Rebecca Meckelburg - Farming Indonesia

Talking Indonesia

One of the signature campaign promises of the Prabowo Subianto presidency is free lunches and milk for Indonesian school kids. This plan is linked to a much wider set of reforms to the way Indonesia’s produces and organises its agriculture sector, including the modernization of agriculture and converting land to plantations. The details are still pretty scant but this is not a thought bubble, food sovereignty is an issue that Prabowo has spent much of his political career touting. Prabowo served as head of the Indonesian Farmers Association and chairs the advisory board for the Primary Rural Cooperative or (Inkud). As Minister of Defence, Prabowo also led Jokowi’s food estate program, using private sector and military resources to open up massive new cassava plantations in Kalimantan. Those plantations failed. But nonetheless the incoming president is undeterred. Prabowo has called Indonesian farmers true patriots who will lead the country to food sovereignty. Food security is going to be the signature policy of the Prabowo administration so I figured we all need a primer not just on agriculture, but a sense of how small holder farming has been organised politically, socially and historically to better understand how grant state projects for agricultural transformation impact the lives of ordinary rural communities.