Indonesia: Farmers lament the impact of La Niña

IRIN Reuters AlertNet 15 Nov 10;

TEGALEGA, 15 November 2010 (IRIN) - Indonesian farmers, who account for 57 percent of the country's poor, are increasingly struggling to deal with the impacts of climate change, as the longer rainy season leads to poorer yields and a shorter harvest.

"Normally one hectare would produce 6MT, now it produces only 2.5MT," says Ujang Majudin of his rice crop.

Majudin heads a farmers' cooperative on the island of Java with more than 300 members. But with such bad weather this year, it is struggling.

"Almost all the crops are destroyed, so production is very low and the price I have to pay for the vegetables is very high," Majudin says, pointing at the piles of rotting vegetables in his storage shed.

Indonesia normally has a six-month wet season (November to March) and a six-month dry season (June to October), but this year it simply kept on raining. The UN World Meteorological Organization blames the weather phenomena La Niña, saying the rains will continue for the next four to six months. As well as vegetable and rice farmers, producers of palm oil, tin, cocoa, coal and rubber also complain about the heavy tropical storms.

The consequences are already being felt at local markets where crop prices have jumped 20 percent.

Farmer Muhamad Subadri has a small plot of land in the fertile hills of Tegalega, a four-hour drive from the capital Jakarta. With nine mouths to feed he is very worried about the enormous rainfall. "The pesticides I use on my crops have been washed away, so caterpillars eat my crops. And for the rice it is a problem because we can't dry it, so it rots."

Rice dependency

In other areas paddy fields are flooded, making it impossible to even harvest the rice, a staple food which Indonesians eat more than any other people on Earth: 136kg per person per year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

For the first time in three years the Indonesian government announced last month it would import rice, even though it aims to be self-sufficient.

"There could be a very wide impact, on the whole of Asia. We'll know by early next year, because La Niña is predicted to last to early 2011... The problem the Indonesian government faces now is uncertainty, which is why their decision to buy rice has been a wise one," said Benni Sormin, assistant representative with the FAO in Jakarta.

Indonesia's food logistics agency, Bulog [ http://www.bulog.co.id/ ], will supplement shrinking stocks for distribution to the poor with bulk imports from Vietnam and Thailand. The agency said it would seek to boost its stockpile to two million MT.

To increase food security for its more than 250 million people, three out of five of whom live in rural areas, the Indonesian government is trying to diversify diet habits to other crops such as corn and wheat. Still, rice is the basis of every meal, a reliance that could make Indonesia vulnerable to price fluctuations on the international markets if shortages continue.

Since 2007, Indonesia has boosted rice production by 15 percent to 36 million tonnes, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, but no official measures have been taken to compensate a possible fall in 2010. Bayu Krisnamurti, the deputy Minister of Agriculture, said government was very aware of the situation.

"We have to be alert and cautious with any of our decisions and look at any opportunity to make the food [situation] secure... But you have to understand that even though the challenge is domestic, the situation is actually global, it is not simply only Indonesia," Krisnamurti said.

Back in the hills of Tegalega, the owner of the cooperative sighs when he sees a pile of just-harvested corn: "Look at the size, so small, that's not normal, not normal at all. It is all because of the rains."