Indonesia taps small-scale farmers to be food suppliers for free meal programme

GARUT (West Java) – 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 Indonesia’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 Mr 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 tending to plots on state land. The initiative began in 1995 with local communities helping 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 such as rice, corn, soya bean, palm sugar, honey and coffee, came to 1.1 trillion rupiah (S$83.9 million) in 2023. Indonesia’s whole agriculture industry in the same year was worth 2,617 trillion rupiah, which is 12.5 per cent 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 ha 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 ha to 1.3 million social forestry households. Many of them have kept the forests free from fires and helped 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.

“The land (that has already been distributed to social forestry households) will become the first priority of the farming intensification,” he told The Straits Times, referring to the 1.9 million ha of land where farming productivity will be enhanced.

Dr Mahfudz said the government will provide support in various forms – from seeds and fertilisers to livestock – to farmers to boost output from activities related to agroforestry, silvopasture and silvofishery in the community-run forests. With agroforestry, farmers plant trees along with crops, while in silvopasture and silvofishery, they combine farming with tending livestock and cultivating seafood like fish and shrimp.

Although the social forestry scheme has been operating for decades, the initiative’s target is primarily environmental conservation.

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, fruit 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 cost about 400 trillion rupiah annually.

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 need 200kg of rice, 3,000 eggs, 350kg of chicken, 350kg of vegetables and 600 litres of milk, among other items, daily.

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 doubt the ability and cost-effectiveness of the free meal programme to help address the problem of malnutrition, economists say that tapping 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 Mr 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 improved 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 tenure rights for a 940ha area in 2017. 

Since the Covid-19 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,” Mr Edi told ST.

He expects the prices of vegetables they grow, such as carrots, potatoes, tomatoes and long beans, to rise by 30 per cent to 50 per cent with demand from the programme. Carrots are now sold at 4,000 rupiah per kg, while cabbages and mustards are sold at 5,000 rupiah per kg.

Another farmer, Mr Ahmad Juansyah, who leads hundreds of forest farmers on the slope of Mount Papandayan in Garut, West Java province, said he faced a similar situation as Mr Edi’s – where middlemen set the prices for products such as coffee and bok choy. 

As such, prices of bok choy have been known to fluctuate from 3,500 rupiah a kilogram, which just covers the production cost and allows for a small profit, to as low as 500 rupiah a kilogram throughout the year.

“We surely can maximise our production as long as there is certainty over the stable prices,” he told ST.  

Dr Dona Octavia, agroforestry expert and senior researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, told ST that farmers under the social forestry scheme will need to enhance their production and ensure a constant flow of produce to effectively contribute to the free meal programme.

The Forestry Ministry’s senior policy analyst Bambang Supriyanto told ST the government will encourage a few farmers’ collectives in one region to focus on several crops needed by the free meal programme to enable them to scale up. They are expected to distribute their semi-processed and finished products through cooperatives, he added.

“By doing it this way, the free meal programme can get sustainable food supply, while the farmer collectives can get greater market access and added value for their products,” he said.