EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As the US and European Union finalise plans to ship large quantities
of food aid to Russia, a senior diplomat at a western embassy in Moscow
sums up the situation bluntly: "I don’t know of a single person in this
building who thinks it is necessary." . . . "There is no shortage in this
country," says one Moscow-based aid expert. "The US and the EU have different
reasons for sending food, and the Russians are willing accomplices, but
by no means is this a humanitarian effort." He says aid would be best spent
purchasing food within Russia to redistribute to poorer regions or on providing
credit and assistance to Russian farmers.
Financial Times, Feb. 5, 1999
The foregoing account could well have been filed on the current situation in Indonesia.
Despite widespread reports to the contrary, Indonesia is not suffering a famine or food crisis in the traditional sense. This is the firm conclusion of an investigating mission that visited Indonesia in late January and early February 1999, under the sponsorship of the Southeast Asia Food Security and Fair Trade Council (referred to as the Council).
The 16-member mission visited several sites in Jakarta, then fanned out to other parts of the archipelago. They focused on data gathering at the micro or community level through semi-structured interviews with the urban poor, farmers, small rural tradespeople, fisherfolk, government officials, various church groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and relief organizations.
Correlation of micro-data with macro-data yielded the main conclusion, that the so-called "food crisis" stemmed from mistaken projections of rice output. These projections were then manipulated by certain forces within the country and used to consolidate their political position - with aid agencies acting as witting or unwitting accomplices.
The critical steps in this manufactured crisis are the following:
I. Two key agencies, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program, projects a massive food shortfall following a survey using questionable methods. The FAO/WFP crop and food supply assessment missions to Indonesia issued Special Reports on 17 April, 1998, 6 October, 1998 and 8 April, 1999. In each of these reports, the actual figures of rice shortage have been inflated by factoring in the amounts of rice held in storage by Bulog, the private sector and households. (see appendix I)
II. On the basis of this projection, the government issues an international call for food aid, which leads to Indonesia becoming the world’s top recipient for food aid in 1998.
III. The drought-caused famine projected by the FAO does not materialize. However, food aid is re-targeted by the government and aid agencies - like the World Food Program from the countryside to the cities - to pacify people who have been laid off as a result of the financial fiasco caused by the government and International Monetary Fund’s macroeconomic policies. As one consultant to a key agency told our team members, "Hungry people are angry people."
IV. The government then uses the aid, not only for social pacification, but also as a mechanism for gathering and consolidating electoral support for the June 1999 elections.
This is not to say that economic conditions in Indonesia are not bad. They are, but these conditions do not call for food aid. They call for economic policies that will provide jobs and income for people that will enable them to eat consistently and have an adequate diet, and buy goods and services to meet their other needs. Aside from serving questionable political ends, food aid in this context can only serve as a superficial solution to a larger structural problem.
That problem has two dimensions, both short-term and long-term. In the short term, the crisis stemmed from the massive loss of confidence among foreign speculative investors. This led to a hemorrhage of capital that triggered the collapse of most of the country’s financial institutions and a great many of its key corporations. However, this short-term crisis has its roots in a development model imposed on the country over the last three decades by the Suharto dictatorship and the World Bank. The elements of this model, which have been unraveling in spectacular fashion over the last two years, are:
I. development based on foreign capital and foreign markets;
II. an industry-first policy, or a strategy that subordinated agriculture to industrial priorities; and
III. within agriculture, the implementation of a Green Revolution-based riziculture.
Agriculture is in trouble in Indonesia, but it is a crisis that is strictly man-made, not one that stems from drought. A huge dependence on fertilizers and other chemical inputs characteristic of Green Revolution technology, has resulted in a fragile agro-technology that can easily be unraveled by policy decisions, like the ending of the fertilizer subsidy. Pushing rice as the staple crop at the expense of other crops, even in regions that formerly consumed non-rice staples, has created a fragile dietary dependence on a crop ill-suited to the climate and geography of those areas.
Indonesia is not experiencing a classical crisis of hunger. It is experiencing a man-made economic collapse. What its people need is not food aid but economic and agricultural reforms of a fundamental kind which will create the jobs and income that will enable them to surmount not only hunger, but poverty. Indonesia’s problems are not the result of climatic changes. They have their origins in the very structure of the economy.