Farmers pushed off arable land

Benyamin Lakitan, Jakarta

Like Native Indians in North America and the Betawi community in Jakarta, farmers have been pushed off the most desirable, fertile land to suboptimal, marginal land in Indonesia and other countries, both in the developing or developed world. This phenomenon is painfully obvious in areas around major cities.

If you visited Jakarta's suburbs (20 to 25 kilometers from the city center) five to 10 years ago, you would have seen rice fields and plots of vegetables and fruit trees. Very little of that remains today. This has not only happened around Jakarta; changes in land use have happened around almost every big city in Indonesia, especially on Java.

The World Bank estimates that by 2010 roughly 13 percent of Java's 3.4 million hectares of rice fields will have been converted into non-agricultural land. A large portion (about one- third) of that conversion will be for housing, the rest for factories, office buildings, golf courses, airports and other infrastructure.

Unfortunately, much of the land being converted is irrigated rice fields, meaning major capital investments in the irrigation systems are being lost. Not to mention other negative consequences, including the loss of food production and jobs for the rural community.

It would be reasonable for the government to require anyone purchasing rice fields for the purpose of converting them into a non-agricultural use to pay not only the price of the land as determined by the seller, but also to reimburse the government for its investment in the irrigation infrastructure.

Verburg, Veldkamp and Bouma (1999), using a land use change model based on the Central Statistics Agency's land use data from 1979 and 1994, as well as data on demography, economy, infrastructure, climate and geomorphology, estimated the conversion rate of agricultural land (rice fields and dry land) into other uses at about 47,500 hectares annually.

The highest conversion rates were along the northern coast of Java and the areas surrounding such major cities as Jakarta, Surabaya and Bandung. However, Yogyakarta and Semarang should not be overlooked.

Where do farmers go? They usually try to find cheaper land in other areas or try their luck as laborers. Finding new fertile land for farming obviously is not easy in Java. The farmers may, however, find land on the outer islands, perhaps in eastern Indonesia, but most of this land has no irrigation systems.

To find a new job, landless farmer must compete with better educated job seekers in the cities. More likely, they will end up working as construction laborers. Some studies indicate that construction workers make more money than farmers. So here they go, changing from farmers to construction workers.

End of story? It may be for our dear landless farmers, but not for those who care about our nation. Fewer rice fields and fewer farmers mean a smaller supply of staple food, less rice available to feed our continuously growing population. Importing more rice may be the instant solution, but increasing dependency on imported rice is not good.

In the past, the common suggestion for solving this issue was the famous: intensification, extensification and diversification.

It is true the average yield of most of our food crops is still below the maximum achievable yield, as demonstrated under intensified field conditions at agricultural experimental stations. However, in most cases, additional production costs exceed the incremental gain in yield. In other words, technologically it is possible to increase yields but it is not always economically sound, and in some cases it may not be environmentally sound.

Since most of our fertile land is already being used for agricultural activities, except for forest reserves (and we do not want to touch these!), the only option left for increasing the acreage of agricultural land is to extend agricultural activities to suboptimal, marginal lands. There are two options for coping with such unfavorable conditions for crop production: altering soil characteristics to make the soil suitable for farming and/or improving the adaptability of crops to unfavorable environments.

Altering soil condition can be done in a short period of time, but please note that this is an irreversible process. Once the physical, chemical and (micro)biological characteristics of soil have changed, it is not possible to reverse the process. If we choose to follow this path, then we must make sure we do not make any mistakes. A good example of a bad decision was when a past government decided to convert one million hectares of peat swamp in South and Central Kalimantan into paddy fields.

Conventional breeding programs and the application of biotechnology can be used to develop varieties or clones of food crops that can adapt to specific unfavorable soil conditions, i.e. acidic, high salinity, drought or hypoxic. This approach may take a lot longer than altering soil conditions, but it is more environmentally sound. For some major food crops, i.e. corn, soybeans and rice, considerable studies have been conducted, but field tests are still needed.

Diversification programs have been underway for decades in order to loosen our dependence on rice. Many crops have proven to be as good as rice in providing carbohydrates for our dietary requirements. However, the majority of Indonesians still depend on rice as a staple food. The main issue in this case is not the nutritional value of a food source, but more about the dietary habits of our people. Changing behavior, as we are well aware, is a very slow process.

Clearly, if we let agricultural land continue to be converted for other uses, we should be prepared for grave consequences. So, please do not push our farmers off their arable land. Farmers need the land to feed us.

The writer is an adviser on food affairs at the Office of the State Minister for Research and Technology. He can be reached at sapg@ristek.g.id.