BRIN Encourages the Commitment of Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates to the Rice Productivity of Local Farmers

Illustration of workers lifting rice from Bulog's warehouse. (doc Bulog)

JAKARTA - The National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) is highlighting the food issue being promoted by three pairs of presidential and vice presidential candidates taking part in the 2024 elections.

BRIN Political Research Center researcher Dini Rahmiati reminded each candidate pair to solve classic problems in the food sector in the form of farmer regeneration and shrinking agricultural land.

"This is a very crucial problem for national leaders. Farmers as the main actors in achieving agricultural productivity are currently experiencing a very significant decline," she said in a seminar on building food sovereignty monitored in Jakarta, Thursday, December 21, reported by Antara.

The dependency ratio of the Indonesian population on rice food reaches 97 percent. Most of the population uses 60 percent of their income to buy food needs and of that amount, around 20 percent is still used for rice consumption.

This requires stable rice prices because fluctuations in the price and supply of rice can encourage economic instability and productivity in the industrial sector (which still largely uses food prices as a basis for calculating wages), so that it can impact political unrest and national instability.

"Rice is one of the main commodities that is important and is greatly influenced by the needs of our nation. Fulfilling rice for public consumption is the government's target to maintain public support," said Dini.

She further said that the average age of farmers is currently over 50 years because many people are no longer interested in becoming farmers.

Based on data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), the rice harvest area in Indonesia in 1998 reached 11.61 million hectares. Meanwhile, the rice harvest area in 2022 will reach around 10.45 hectares.

Since the New Order era until the reform era, food and agricultural sector policies, especially rice, have undergone changes identified according to the national political leadership regime.

This can be seen from a series of national priority policies and programs in accordance with the term of office of the elected president, so that the direction of development in the agricultural and food sector is not steady and sustainable.

"As a result, the arrangement of the agricultural sector has not progressed and the problems of food and agricultural governance are still getting worse," said Dini.

BRIN views that the commitment of presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2024 elections to achieve food independence or food sovereignty needs to be followed by policies that are not just related to availability and a production approach.

"Productivity can only increase if the classic food problem in Indonesia can be handled well, namely the problem of farmer regeneration and shrinking agricultural land," she stressed.