Working the land: A farmer pulling out grass that grows alongside cabbage and other crops planted on the slope of Mount Papandayan in Garut, West Java province. — The Straits Times/ANN
A decades- old social forestry scheme where local communities tend to state land mostly for the purpose of conservation has become a key part of the government’s free meal programme for millions of people.
President Prabowo Subianto and his administration plan to feed some 80 million people within the first two years of launching the ambitious programme, set to officially begin in January.
To meet the operational needs of Prabowo’s flagship initiative, officials are looking to source its food from all avenues, including turning to small-scale farmers, who will receive help from the government to ramp up production and bolster food security.
Around 15,000 collectives of farmers under the social forestry scheme have been living and tending to plots on state land. The initiative began in 1995 where local communities help to conserve state and customary forests by growing crops on once barren and degraded land.
Under the initiative, sales of food produced by the millions of social forestry farmers, including key raw goods like rice, corn, soybean, palm sugar, honey and coffee, were valued at 1.1 trillion rupiah in 2023.
By comparison, Indonesia’s whole agriculture industry in the same year amounted to 2,617 trillion rupiah, which is 12.5% of the country’s gross domestic product.
In 2015, the government overhauled the scheme, giving legal rights to these rural communities for up to 35 years, to manage 12.7 million hectares of state and customary forests – equivalent to the size of Java island.
This was planned as a way to address poverty and reduce conflicts over land tenure.
It has so far handed over 8.1 million hectares of land to 1.3 million social forestry households. Many of them have kept the forests free from fires and maintain the ecological balance.
The government is still in the process of identifying the kind of produce from the social forestry farmers that can be used for the free meal scheme, said Dr Mahfudz Muchtar, the Forestry Ministry’s director-general for social forestry and environmental partnerships.
Mahfudz noted that the government will provide support in various forms – from seeds, fertilisers to livestock – to the local farmers to boost the output from activities related to agroforestry, silvopasture and silvofishery in the community-run forests.
Given the required amount of food for the free meal initiative, the small-scale farmers are being encouraged to scale up and take on a bigger role in supplying milk and food, such as vegetables, fruits and meat, to the programme.
The campaign will also involve private companies, including small and mid-sized ones, officials said.
The free meal programme aims to distribute nutritious meals to 82.9 million schoolchildren and pregnant women across Indonesia and will annually cost about 400 trillion rupiah (RM111bil).
According to the National Food Agency, there will be around 30,000 meal distribution centres across the nation. Each one, catering to 3,000 children, will among other things, need 200kg of rice, 3,000 eggs, 350kg of chicken, 350kg of vegetables and 600 litres of milk, every day.
The programme has been on trial since January 2024, in schools in cities like Jakarta and Semarang in Central Java, and will officially launch in January 2025.
Together with the National Planning Agency, the Forestry Ministry is also proposing a national strategic project to support food security, which will run from 2025 to 2029 and involve social forestry farmers and villages.
While critics have cast doubt over the ability and cost-effectiveness of the free meal programme to help address the problem of malnutrition, economists say that tapping on farmers at the regional level will bring greater impact to the economy.
For one thing, by procuring food for the programme on a more local level, distribution costs will be lower across the vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands.
“The food procurement at the local level will allow the budget for the programme to benefit local farmers and boost sales of small and medium-sized enterprises. It will also help distribute jobs,” said Bhima Yudhistira, executive director of Jakarta-based think-tank Centre for Economic and Law Studies.
The plan to draw from and ramp up produce from the social forestry scheme has been greatly welcomed by farmers who eye higher earnings and improve their livelihoods.
Farmer Edi Santoso leads a collective of social forestry farmers, consisting of 641 families in Lumajang, East Java province. He hopes the free meal programme can increase revenue for his community, which secured their tenure rights in a 656ha area in 2017.
Since the pandemic, prices of their produce have fluctuated significantly, even leading a number of the farmers to quit farming due to big losses.
They are also at the mercy of middlemen, who buy their produce at low prices and sell them at higher prices at markets.
“We’ve been facing fluctuations in prices set by the middlemen. Hopefully (being part of the free meal) programme will help standardise the prices. It will be great for farmers like me,” said Edi. — The Straits Times/ANN
