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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

The Evolving Sphere of Food Security

John McCarthy

To cite this article: John McCarthy (2015) The Evolving Sphere of Food Security, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:2, 315-316, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2015.1061928 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1061928

Published online: 24 Aug 2015.

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Book Reviews 315

in institutionalising during the country’s transition to democracy. It is to be hoped that Fionna’s book, from the ideographic political research tradition, prompts

other, more nomothetic studies.

Philips Vermonte

Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta

The Evolving Sphere of Food Security. Edited by Rosamond L. Naylor.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 394. Hardback: A$119.95.

This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of food security. The editor, Rosamond Naylor, of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), has arranged the book around two key questions: How do the challenges

of achieving food security change as an economy develops, and how do policies

in one country affect outcomes in other countries?

Naylor’s introduction offers a bird’s-eye view of the various dimensions of malnutrition. It presents a bewildering range of statistics, such as the observa

-tion that almost a third of the global popula-tion suffers from micronutrient dei

-ciency. Naylor lirts with linear, evolutionary models of development beloved by earlier generations of scholars but perhaps now viewed with less favour, par

-ticularly by non-economists whose disciplines problematise a teleological vision. Nonetheless, Naylor’s introduction brings out highly pertinent observations. For instance, it evokes James Scott’s description of high modernist schemes in noting that too many large-scale schemes fail; Naylor suggests that policymakers search instead for localised solutions that would provide pathways for upward mobility and ind ways to scale up such successes.

Naylor draws on available research to conclude that broad-based economic

growth may not necessarily provide the very food insecure with a means out of desperate poverty traps, especially if there are wide disparities in income and

assets. Any such generalisations of course risk running up against the work of specialists versed in the speciicities of particular cases. For instance, Naylor sees

oil palm as a driver of pro-poor growth in Indonesia. She concludes elsewhere, however, that growth can occur overall even while it worsens outcomes for

small-holders unable to intensify their crop production. Sadly, this is the fate of too many very poor landowners in the oil-palm districts of Indonesia who, unable to access inputs and high-quality planting materials, risk being left behind because of the limited demand for labour on neighbouring plantation estates.

BIES readers will perhaps be most interested in Walter Falcon’s chapter, ‘Food

Security for the Poorest Billion: Policy Lessons from Indonesia’, in which the author sets out his experience working on improving the country’s food secu

-rity during the Soeharto period. He offers an insider’s account of the remarkable

growth in rice production. He also reminds us of how Indonesia used state rev-enues from oil exports in the 1970s and 1980s to improve rural infrastructure and rice production, reducing food poverty more effectively than many other

coun-tries. Along the way he provides insights into key policy debates, such as whether

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316 Book Reviews

to focus on industry or agriculture, whether to pursue integrated rural devel-opment or sequenced central policies, and how to address the classic dilemma

of balancing the needs of consumers and farmers. In one revealing section he describes how New Order technocrats handled the choice between depending on international markets for a staple like rice or pursuing food self-suficiency.

The preoccupation with self-suficiency remains the idée ixe of Indonesian policy. Falcon charts the origins of this preoccupation: when policymakers con

-cluded that Indonesia could no longer depend on thin international markets for its rice. Thus, Indonesia aspired to self-suficiency, even while policymakers prag

-matically allowed for imports during lean years. Locating the balance between ongoing government intervention and market reliance remains a challenge, and it would have been useful if the author had brought his observations up to the

present.

Perhaps the only other shortcoming of Falcon’s chapter is that the author contin

-ues to conceptualise the food problem from a productivist standpoint, discussing

supply and production in national terms. Despite the enormous achievements of

the green revolution, however, a third of Indonesian children under ive continue to suffer from stunting. This suggests that food poverty still aflicts a very large number of Indonesians, particularly agricultural labourers and those depending upon agricultural and isheries production in the outer islands. Very little is to be gleaned about these ongoing entitlement failures from Falcon’s chapter, as ques

-tions of food access opened up by more sociological accounts are beyond its scope.

For those with an interest in Asia, perhaps a few more chapters could have

moved beyond Sub-Saharan Africa—clearly the focus of FSE. While the book sets

out to offer a multidisciplinary approach, it draws mostly on economics, with

few chapters making use of the insights offered by geography, rural sociology, or

anthropology. Nonetheless, there are very interesting chapters on poverty traps (chapter 6), the food security–water nexus (chapter 7), and land (chapters 8 and 12), as well as other important issues. Overall, Naylor has succeeded in

offer-ing a rich overview of the variety of problems associated with food security. As the book responds to the renewed interest in food policy and demonstrates the need for intellectual bricolage to address this multidimensional issue, it success

-fully belies simplistic productivist approaches that truncate so much of the policy

discussion.

John McCarthy