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)