Poor management may stall agricultural development

Poor management may stall agricultural development

KUTA, Bali (JP): Poor management and lack of coordination
among research centers, government offices and universities may
impede agricultural development and threaten the security of
Indonesia's food supplies, academicians say.

Steve R. Tabor, a researcher at the Netherlands-based
International Service for National Agricultural Research, told
The Jakarta Post in an interview that despite the significant
developments achieved in the last 25 years, Indonesia has much to
do to keep up with technological changes in the agricultural
sector.

While universities and agricultural research centers are both
developing rapidly, they are not doing so at the same pace, he
said.

"Agricultural research centers have developed under the
Ministry of Agriculture and universities under the Ministry of
Education and Culture. They make fantastic progress, but research
has gone its own way and education its own way," Tabor said.

"And very unfortunately, there's been very little funding for
research in universities," he said.

In addition to this, he said, technological challenges are
becoming more complex, especially with the shift of focus in the
agricultural sector from developing basic food crops to
increasing the productivity of non-crop commodities such as
fishery, livestock and horticulture.

Indonesia is also quickly moving on to new, environmentally-
adverse and unexplored agricultural regions such as Kalimantan
and Irian Jaya.

"But it is difficult to develop good management systems when
growth is occurring very rapidly," he said.

Tabor said it will take some time for the management systems
to catch up with the advances in agricultural development.
Meanwhile, the gap "accesses a constraint to performance", he
said.

Agricultural research systems in Indonesia, he cited, have
very few business managers, accountants, lawyers and people with
practical management training.

"You have very complex challenges and many institutions that
are fragmented... At the same time, Indonesia is entering areas
where there will be very little international contribution to
technological efforts," he said.

He said Indonesia should, for example, start engineering on
its own the most appropriate strains of agricultural commodities
which are most capable of meeting demand.

"There's really nobody that's going to be providing technology
from outside that's suitable for Irian Jaya or Kalimantan," he
pointed out.

Challenges

"So you have very complex challenges. The organizations are
somewhat weakly managed, and most of the strong capacity in
agriculture research is in Java. It's a pity, but that's not
where the challenge is in the future," he said.

Peter Timmer, an agricultural economist and a professor of
development studies at Harvard University, also said that
research systems in many developing countries are "not working
very well".

"And if it's not working well now, we'll have problems with
productivity shortly, which means we'll also have problems with
food security," he said.

Timmer contended that productivity problems must be solved
because they will never go away.

Food security, he said, has so far required careful government
intervention in developing countries on behalf of the poor and of
price stability.

"Markets are very efficient but they don't worry very much
about either poverty or about stability... Free trade would
probably make the position of the poor in developing countries
worse," he said.

He said the first concern of developing countries at the
moment is to determine what mechanisms they have at their
disposal to ensure domestic food security in the context of a
"very unstable" world economy. (pwn)