The Paradox of Agrarian Change. Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia eds. by John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Paradox of Agrarian Change. Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia eds. by John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom Pujo Semedi John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom (Eds.). The Paradox of Agrarian Change. Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press, 2023. First of all, I would like to convey my appreciation to the editors and all authors for the publication. This book is constructive work that aims not only to gain an understanding of what is going on among farming and fishing communities but to take a step further to develop "possibilities for moving to a better system to provide vulnerable households with a 'rightful share' of the benefits being distributed." As the title indicates, this book discusses the paradox that took place in Indonesian agrarian communities as they move from poverty to prosperous life. Now, farmers live in well-built, nice houses, have motorbikes, and are capable of sending their children to school. In the midst of this prosperity, nutritional insecurity among farmers remains high. To identify how the paradox operates in the farmers' and rural inhabitants' livelihood, John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom propose three factors: (1) proximate actors and contextual triggers that are temporally and spatially close to the livelihood outcomes and agrarian changes pattern and that appear to facilitate them directly," (2) structural mechanisms that operate diffusely and shape the context, and (3) relational processes, "the informal and formal power relations that shape people's actions and lead to relations of debt and dependency." The three processes are assumed to operate in independent connection, one to another, which eventually lead to livelihood trajectories. These three factors were observed through eight ethnographic cases among farming, fishing, and plantation communities in various parts of Indonesia, which ended in findings of eight scenarios of agrarian change: smallholder development, enclave, sideways, precarious developmental, fishing boom, resource degradation, boom crop agrarian differentiation, and subsistence-oriented. The findings indicate that the agrarian paradox and changes in Indonesia do not occur through similar paths and lead to the same future for farmers. This is one of the strong points of John McCarthy, McWilliam, and Nooteboom's work: sensitivity to the variety of agrarian change pathways. Another strong point can be found in the authors' conclusion, that to solve the agrarian change paradox in Indonesia there is a need to formulate "other redistributive policy settings and strategies . . . which shift the structural driven of inequality and invest in the productive capacity of people to empower their future". I have a few notes for this book. First, is related to nutritional insecurity. Various studies show that life expectancy in Indonesia in the past was much lower than it is today. Among some other factors, it was related to poor nutritional status among Indonesians, that a slight infection could easily send people to their death. Now Indonesian life expectancy is higher, indicating that the prevalence and intensity of nutrition insecurity are no longer as severe as in the past. It is probable, that a better indicator for the paradox of agrarian change is not in the farmers' nutritional status, but in the nature of their prosperity. [End Page 181] With a lot of assets farmers now look prosperous but at the same time they are deeply indebted. Almost all the modern utilities owned by farmers were obtained through credit. The crops they cultivate nowadays require a high capital input. Advertisements for consumer goods that symbolize a prosperous life come from all directions. Farmers are pushed, lured, and trapped to join an unforgiving debt relationship with semi-formal and formal banks that know no delay in repayments. A TKO relation, thus Javanese farmers said: tan kena ora, a sure, undeferred obligation. When the time to pay comes, it has to be settled no matter what. Very probably the farmer's prosperity is a pseudo rather than a real one. It is based on perpetual debt, and very likely closer scrutiny will reveal that their balance sheet is negative, or at least they are bound to work for the banks forever. Second, technically the deployment of "proximate actors and contextual triggers...