Rice and the Elementary Politics of a Nation

The discussion over one million tons of rice imports has reminded me of two articles I wrote for Kompas several decades ago.

The first article, published on November 30, 1978, was Menjadikan Desa sebagai Guru Orang Kota [making the villages teacher for urbanites]. The article received recognition from the Association of Agricultural Economics Scholars (Perhepi) under the leadership of Prof. Mubyarto (1938-2005).

The second article Urbanisasi: Wadah Mobilitas Vertikal Massa Miskin Kota? [urbanization: a mode for vertical mobility of poor urban people] was published on November 12, 1980.

The two articles, which were presented some 40 years ago, discussed almost the same premise.

Also read: Questioning Rice Import Plan

The first article was actually a "satire" about then-dominant technocratism. According to Michel Foucault (1926-1994) in his lecture in 1967, they held a trump card and, as quoted by Sharon D Welch in The Lush Life: Foucault\'s Analytics of Power and a Jazz Aesthetic (2001), would offer a definition of "happiness”.

The 1978 article was written way before the publication of Patrick Allan Sharma\'s book Robert McNamara\'s Other War: The World Bank and International Development (2017), which mentions the closeness of McNamara (1916-2009), when he was US Secretary of Defense during President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), with Indonesia.

In the article, I alluded to his speech in Nairobi in his capacity as president of the World Bank. He declared a new direction for the World Bank\'s credit program, which would be more focused on rural and agricultural development. His speech changed the direction of development in developing countries, including Indonesia.

Suggestions I imparted in my 1978 article touched on McNamara’s World Bank policy.

The second article (1980) shed light on how the modernization of rural areas had changed the structure of social relations in the region.

With rural elites gaining more advantages through the modernization and mechanization of agriculture, the existing patron-client relationships were being "corrected".

Because the rural elites, namely those who own vast land -- through the mechanization of agriculture -- started to turn to the market mechanism, while landless laborers lost "social protection". Urbanization became the only way out for the latter.

Big cities, as the destinations of urbanization, provided a place of economic articulation for them through informal sector. Given their performance capacity, this sector, as I speculatively stated in 1980, showed the potential for vertical mobility of the urban poor people.

Also read: Rice Imports and Government Stocks

It turned out decades later, as I described in Aktor Ekonomi Akar Rumput [grassroot economic actors] (Kompas, 17/4/2015), the vertical mobility of the urban poor was very slow.

As an example is a middle-aged woman selling fruit cocktail at Cibubur market. Called bude [elder aunty], from Klaten, Central Java, she ventured to Jakarta in the early 2000s. She was only able to rent a room for Rp 25,000 per month. As her sales grew, she managed to rent a room for Rp 350,000 per month in 2015, which for her was an achievement. In fact, it was the beginning of slowing, even declining vertical mobility, because three years later, in March 2018, bude could no longer afford to rent a kiosk at Cibubur Market. In 2019, she died in Klaten.

Socio-economic trend

The two socio-economic phenomena above pertain to what I call the post-“urbanization without industrialization" period. The term was introduced by Clifford Geertz (1926-2006). In his book Agricultural Involution (1962), Geertz saw huge problem that gripped the rural areas of Java and urban at the same time.

Without the possibility of additional land supply, the rapid population growth in rural region of Java, which had by then taken place since several centuries back, led to agricultural involution, which was an agricultural development that "folds in", absorbing population -- how big it may be -- in the direction of internal complexity and inefficiency.

This structural situation caused what Geertz referred to as shared poverty among Javanese rural communities.

It was ironic because at the same time urban areas were unable to accommodate the excess rural population productively. Still strongly influenced by the colonial mode of production which relied on the export sector of agricultural and extractive products since 1830, industrialization did not develop in urban areas. Until Agricultural Involution was published in the early 1960s, what happened in Indonesia was "urbanization without industrialization".

However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as recorded in the book by Anne Booth and Peter McCawley, The Indonesian Economy During the Soeharto Era (1981), the economic development during the New Order (1967-1998) moved into a two-way direction. While rural agriculture was experiencing modernization and mechanization, at the same time industrialization, or more precisely manufacturing, was taking place in urban areas.

The effect was the socio-economic life of urban areas entered a period of "post-urbanization without industrialization".

All of this not only caused the relative erosion of the influence of the colonial mode of production in the Indonesian economy, but also effected the economic structure. It was indicated by the increasing contribution of the non-agricultural sectors (manufacturing, trade and services) to the gross national product, and the shrinking contribution of the agricultural sector.

Also read: Addiction to Food Imports

All of this triggered massive urbanization, especially in Java. Apart from "traditional" urbanization, which saw those who were pushed out from rural areas because of the pressure of modernization and agricultural mechanization, the urbanization process was motivated by the accelerated provision of education. Increasingly educated rural children needed not only higher education, up to the university level, but, as once alluded to by the poet WS Rendra (1935-2009) in Sajak Seonggok Jagung [poem of corn], they were beginning to see it irrelevant to remain in rural economic life, unless they were accommodated in the manufacturing sector and others in urban areas.

The resulting economic side effect was that big cities became centers of money circulation. Thus, the urban population grew bigger and bigger. They were made up of those of “traditional” urbanization, fruit cocktail-selling bude and educated young people, who viewed their skills would be more applicable in non-agricultural occupations in urban areas.

Rice and inflation politics

At this point, the availability of rice has become an existential issue. The massive urbanization has not only led to a shifted demographic leaning greatly to toward urban areas, but also brought about a historical bottleneck in pattern and distribution of land ownership in Java’s rural areas.

This is related with the Dutch colonial tax system, which in the 19th century encouraged communal rather than individual land ownership as stated by Ong Hok Ham in Madiun dalam Kemelut Sejarah: Priyayi dan Petani di Karesidenan Madiun Abad XIX (2018) [Madiun in historical conflict: Nobleperson and farmers Madiun residency in the XIX century].

Coupled with the rapid population growth, through the inheritance system, rural people’s ownership to farming land was reduced to fragmented small portion.

So, as I watched along with anthropologist Aris Arif Mundayat, in Kemusuk Village, Yogyakarta, in 1999, despite the land fertility and good irrigation system, the farmers of the village where Suharto was born was only able to produce rice for consumption for three months.

It means that not only the urban population but also most farmers in rural Java, by their ownership of small rice fields, require the purchase of rice for consumption.

Because of the high population growth in all regions, the increase in the number of “mouth” – using Geertz’s term -- to consume rice is far greater than the production capacity at the domestic level.

This is where we see the logic of "inflation politics". As we often learn from BPS [Indonesia Statistics] press conferences, rice is considered to weigh significantly in the Indonesian economy. In other words, because most of the income structure of the majority of Indonesia\'s population is spent on food, rice scarcity becomes very sensitive to inflation.

Also read: Food Industry Road Map

Thus, rice for the Indonesian economy is included in what economist Irving S Friedman calls -- in Inflation: A World-Wide Disaster (1973) -- chronic excess demand.

High demand for a commodity undoubtedly drives up its price. And rice scarcity in this chronic excess demand structure not only increases the price of the commodity, but, because of its "heavy load", sparks an increase in the prices of other commodities both in urban and rural areas.

Thus, the availability of rice for more than 200 million "mouths" has structurally shifted from an economic problem to a politico-economic problem, where the legitimacy of power is at stake. Besides being used to "persuade" urban people during the New Order era, as revealed by William Liddle in The Politics of Shared Growth: Some Indonesian Cases (1996), proportional availability of rice functions as an inflation control.

As I, Imam Ahmad and friends, described in Beras, Koperasi dan Politik Orde Baru: Bustanil Arifin 70 Tahun (1996) [rice, cooperatives and New Order politics: Bustanil Arifin 70 years], rice-related inflation has become a frightening specter for New Order rulers.

Even though the fall of Soekarno (1901-1970) in the mid-1960s had passed several decades back, the trauma of its declining political legitimacy due to hyperinflation strongly haunted the successors collectively, because they were aware the hyperinflation rooted in the scarcity of rice. This trauma pushed the New Order authorities to make Bulog\'s [logistics agency] function effective. This trauma also prompted Suharto (1921-2008) to promote a rice self-sufficiency program, which was realized in 1984.

KOMPAS/WILIBRORDUS MEGANDIKA WICAKSONO

Farmers in Brobot Village, Purbalingga, Central Java, Tuesday (23/3/2021), refused to import rice that was planned by the government.

Food development

However, we know that the rice self-sufficiency period did not last long.

Having been stable in 1985-1986, in 1987, in the wake of harvest failure, rice imports were reopened. Such a measure gave an "impression" that either because of real needs or concerns about the government’s political legitimacy, the rice import policy became sine qua non.

Apart from the noisy voices in the House of Representatives (DPR) and the public, this “impression” has created polemic in the current rice import policy.

To somehow provide clarity on the issue, Kompas (30/3/2021) published two polemics-related articles: Candu Impor Pangan [opium for food imports] by economist Enny Sri Hartati and Impor Beras dan Cadangan Pemerintah [rice imports and government reserves] by former head of Bulog Sapuan Gafar.

Also read: Structural Requirements for 2021 Optimism

While Sri Hartati bases her perspectives on quantitative data to refuse imports, Sapuan provides more administrative explanations about when imports should be carried out.

What we have forgotten is that the entire political-economic history of Indonesia has given a strong message that the politics of economic development in Indonesia from then on, now and in the future must be based on food self-sufficiency, especially rice. What we call rice-based economic development will become even more legitimate when considering the inevitable population growth and the demographic dynamics.

We may claim to be a great nation, but since our independence we have not been able to solve this most elementary issue, have we?

The latter is signified not only by the fact that the distribution of urban and rural populations is increasingly balanced, but also the shrinking agricultural land impacted by population growth and the increasing number of “mouths” who need rice in rural areas.

In my opinion, to realize rice-based economic development, we need to pull together the political energy of the DPR, the "technocratism" of the state apparatus and the intellectualism of agricultural graduates from various universities.

KOMPAS/JOHNNY TG

Fachry Ali

Not only do we ridicule the polemic over rice imports but the realized rice-based economic development will create the most elementary political-economic stability. We may claim to be a great nation, but since our independence we have not been able to solve this most elementary issue, have we?

Fachry Ali, One of the Founders of the Institute for Study and Development of Business Ethics (LSPEU Indonesia.