Conversion of Agricultural Land: The Greatest Threat Indonesia and the World Food Security
Agriculture is a sector that dominates the Indonesian economy. Agriculture as a source of food to meet the needs of Indonesia society. However, with increasing population in Indonesia from year to year, the need for land in non-agricultural sectors such as housing, shops, industrial, transportation to be increased, resulting in a large amount of agricultural land converted. It is also triggered by spatial and non-agricultural farms which are not integrated and overlapping so that it is easy to convert agricultural land. This case affects food production indirectly that can threaten Indonesia food security. It proved to declining food production last few years coupled with the increasing number of food imports.
The most appropriate solution to resolve this problem is to re-spatial planning and farm and non-farm agriculture to be integrated so that their use are not overlapping. Thus, they can reduce the amount of agricultural land conversion.
Factors of Food Insecurity
In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is the richest natural resources country. Indonesia is the second largest country which has the world's biodiversity, including 800 types of food plants. Potential food plant species consist of 77 kinds of plant sources of carbohydrates, 75 kinds of plant sources of fat / oil, 26 kinds of beans, 389 types of fruits, 228 kinds of vegetables, 40 kinds of beverage ingredients and 110 types of herbs and spices and seasonings. However, ironically, in the Indonesian food security index is on the 64th which is far below Malaysia (33), China (38), Thailand (45), Vietnam (55) and the Philippines (63). It illustrates that Indonesia has experienced problems in the food security sector.
The low index of Indonesian food is influenced by many factors. One of them is land decreased every year, resulting in the production of food crops in Indonesia which also continues to decline from year to year. This is caused by the high rate of agricultural land conversion into non-agricultural land. For example, in Java, which is one of the major islands in Indonesia which became national granary, it has 4.1 million hectares of paddy field in 2007. Unfortunately, in 2013, it remains 3.5 million hectares with a conversion rate of 145,000 hectares per year and decreased production of 1.3 million tons of rice per year (Central Bureau of Statistic). Other data even mentions that the rate of conversion of paddy fields in Indonesia reaches 110 thousand hectares year, and only be offset by the government with the printing of 40 thousand hectares of paddy fields every year. It means, there are about 60 thousand hectares lost. Without serious efforts from the government, less than 20 years from now there will be no paddy fields in Indonesia.
This would be the biggest threat to Indonesia food security, given rice is the staple food of the Indonesia people. Indonesian people eat rice as much as 130 kilograms per year per capita. This number is even greater than the American and Japanese consumption that puts Indonesia as the country with the third highest consumption of rice in the world after China and India.
Instead of rice, other Indonesian food commodities such as corn, soybean, cassava, even fruits and vegetables are also suffered the same fate due to a decrease in land area due to land conversion. At the end, all of the above commodities decreased the amount of production each year. Therefore, conversion of agricultural land into the biggest threat to Indonesia food security.
Actually, the government has done a variety of ways to reduce the rate of conversion of agricultural land, including enacting some regulations on the protection of agricultural land as well as rules on the conversion of agricultural land into non-agricultural land. However, steps taken by the government failed to suppress the amount of land conversion significantly. This is due to the spatial planning and integrated so that the resulting layout is often chaotic and overlapping each other, especially agriculture spatial and
non-spatial agriculture. So that agricultural land entered into spatial cultivation areas and rural areas are often displaced by residential construction activity, factories, and shops are located in urban spatial planning, land disputes and often occur due to poor layout.
Poor layout in Indonesia triggered the rate of conversion of agricultural land, for agricultural land mostly belongs to the people who work as farmers are low-income communities so that they are easy to buy their agricultural land by large companies that want to build non-agricultural sectors such as housing, factories, and shopping. Furthermore, the poor spatial constraints in Indonesia is still a major investment problem in the agricultural sector, particularly investment in food crops. This is why the Indonesian agriculture is not progressing satisfactorily even tended to decline each year, and became a threat to Indonesia food security Indonesia for next few decades.
The Global/Widespread Connection
Indonesia's presence affects the global world, including in terms of food. Therefore, Indonesia is a country that has the largest population among all countries in ASEAN and a fourth most populous country in the world. This number continues to increase every year. With the population, Indonesia requires a very large source of food to meet all the needs of the population. Although Indonesia is an agricultural country, but agriculture in Indonesia has not been able to meet all of these requirements so that the Indonesian government adopted a policy of food imports from several countries in the world.
For example, based on data from the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2013, Indonesia's rice imports reached 1.8 million tons with a value of US $ 945.6 million. Largest country supplying rice to the homeland is Vietnam with a total of 1.1 million tonnes, after the Thailand of 315.4 thousand tons, then, India with a total of 259 thousand tons of rice imports, followed by Pakistan with a total of 133.1 thousand tons, the next China as much as 3,099 tons. Besides rice, Indonesia also imported maize in large enough quantities. In 2013, imports of maize Indonesia reached 1.7 million tons. State is India's largest corn importer with total imports of 1.1 million tons, and Argentina with total imports of 286.3 thousand tons, then Pakistan at 146.2 thousand tons, followed by Brazil as much as 74.4 thousand tons then the latter is United States as much as 44.2 thousand tons.
Instead of rice and corn, in 2013 Indonesia imported 6.3 million tonnes of wheat, 1.9 million tons of soybeans, potatoes 54.1 thousand tons, 4.7 million tonnes of wheat flour, cassava 479.7 thousand tons, and sugar 91.1 thousand tons of sand. Even Indonesia also import fruits and vegetables from various countries.
Based on data from the Ministry of Commerce of the Republic of Indonesia, the number of Indonesia’s food imports continued to increase from year to year. This is caused by the Indonesian population growth also continues to increase so that the food needs of Indonesia also continues to increase. In addition, domestic food supply continues to decline every year due to a decrease in national food production, coupled with large amounts of land conversion that contribute to a reduction of food production from the agricultural sector.
So during the Indonesian agricultural problems, especially problems of conversion of agricultural land has not been able to be resolved, Indonesia will continue to rely on other countries through its food import policy. This situation will continue to deteriorate from year to year and will contribute directly affect the food security of other countries, particularly countries that import food to Indonesia.
Solution
The core of the problem of agricultural land conversion in Indonesia is the design and layout of the chaotic region and overlap. Various kinds of layout designed by the government ranging from spatial forest areas, rural areas, agricultural areas, to the urban industrial area and overlap. So the only solution to fix the chaotic layout is to integrate spatial planning, sustainable, and based on the principles of ecological. It has been done by some developed countries in the world such as Germany. In addition, the government also must establish regulations regarding spatial area, because 50% of counties and cities in Indonesia do not own a spatial regulations. And these regulations shall be in accordance with an integrated spatial planning, sustainable and ecological principle.
