Problems and Prospective Strategies for Achieving Food Security in Indonesia

Audira Wirifdah Armanitya

15/383582/PN/14413

Food security, as defined by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security,
means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient,
safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and
healthy life. Food security involves multiple aspects that could affect global stability on
economy, social, and politic issues. Not only on macro scale, the impact of achieving food
security is involved in every citizen’s well-being.
With steady economy growth and declining poverty rate, Indonesia still face obstacles
to overcome food insecurity. Our nation’s still struggling with three main problems regarding
food provision: Production, Distribution, and Consumption. Our food production capacity has
been decreasing for several factors such as subsiding farming land, low technology and
infrastructure capability, extreme climate, degeneration of farmers, to incoordination between
stakeholders including poor management by local as well as central government. Not only
production, our food distribution has been challenged by several concerns such as insufficient
infrastructure that led to unequal access to rural areas, unstable market price due to unstructured
marketing scheme and a diverse range of commodities that hasn’t been backed by well-
managed distribution system. Another problem that we’re facing is regarding our food
consumption which has not been fulfilled both from quantity of energy consumption and
unbalanced nutrient with carbohydrates still dominating our daily intake.
Establishing our problems could help us develop prospective strategies in order to
achieve food security in Indonesia. Policy makers are expected to draft food-related regulations
that should ensure equal access for entire nation’s population, improving farmer’s welfare, as
well as minimizing reliance on imports. There are several strategies that can be used such as:
expanding farming land by utilizing unused land, innovation of farming technology to boost
our agriculture productivity, build better infrastructure to accommodate equal distribution,
food diversification to minimize our dependency towards rice and wheat as well as improving
our nutritional intake, and last not but least well-coordinated effort from farmers, government,
private sectors, and other stakeholders to create a stable market with sustainable food
production to fulfill supply and demand in order to achieve food security in Indonesia.