Jakarta – Indonesia will make food security its top priority as the country speeds up progress toward reducing hunger and poverty as part of its commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, a minister says.
"We are determined to place food security at the top of our agenda. Indonesia needs to go beyond food self-sufficiency, as in the future it also needs to help feed other countries devastated by famine," Agriculture Minister Suswono said Friday.
At macro-policy levels, Indonesia managed to post a steady gradual increase in food productivity, which helped the government combat the recent increase in food prices, he said at the launch of the 1BillionHungry campaign, an FAO global drive to end poverty and hunger.
The Agriculture Ministry says Indonesia boosted last year's production of rice and corn to 64 million and 17 million tons – up 6.2 percent and 7.2 percent – respectively, from 2008. Rice and corn are the main staple foods in Indonesia.
The productions of soy and meat also jumped 20.45 percent and 3 percent to 1 million and 500,000 tons, respectively.
However, at micro-policy levels, Indonesia had to double its efforts to meet the MDGs because some areas in Indonesia, such as Papua and Kalimantan, were still prone to food scarcity, especially rice.
"Apart from the lack of infrastructure, another factor contributing to food insufficiency is culture. In Papua, for instance, many people have changed their staple food from tubers to rice," the minister said.
He added that as a consequence, the shortage of rice in Papua was inevitable due to problems of distance and high transportation costs, causing the price of rice there to skyrocket.
In terms of poverty and hunger reduction efforts, food security played a huge role in curbing cases of poverty and hunger in Indonesia.
Achmad Suryana, the head of food security at the ministry, said the government had succeeded in bringing down the number of people living on less than US$1 a day from 20.6 percent in 1990 to 5.9 percent in 2008, meaning the country had surpassed the 2015 MDG target, which was to reduce the figure to 10.3 percent.
However, the number of people living in poverty in general was still high at around 32.2 million in 2009, 14 percent of the total population.
"When we talk about hunger, we can't ignore poverty as one of the root causes of hunger itself," Achmad said, adding that Indonesia had decreased malnutrition rates, especially among infants, from 31 percent in 1990 to 18.4 percent in 2007. The MDG target stands at 15.5 percent.
"The good news is that we have also been able to boost Indonesians' energy and protein intake, which is now on average around 3,900 kilocalories per capita per day," he said, adding that the number doubled that of the minimum standard of food rations of 1,400 kilocalories suggested by the World Food Program.
FAO representative in Indonesia Man Ho So said the organization now focused on its 1 Billion Hungry campaign, an online petition drive to attract at least one million signatures to a petition calling on the world "to get angry about hunger".
"The petition will be presented to the UN at the end of 2010 and will coincide with World Food Day," he said.