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When Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan suggested that Indonesians eat less rice, the critics and cynics had a field day. After all, Indonesia consumes more rice than any country except China and India, and attempts to get people to cut back on it have never worked before.

Others argue that the move could plunge Indonesian farmers, who as well as cultivating rice are among the poorest Indonesians, further into poverty.

Gita said his aim was to transform Indonesia from being a net importer to a net exporter of rice.

“We are the largest per capita consumer of rice in the world; consuming about 140kg of rice per person per year. In Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia they consume a mere 65 to 75kg per capita... half the amount we do. If we were to (reduce) the demand by 40kg, hypothetically that would mean a saving of 10 million tonnes of rice,” Gita said during a recent talk to foreign correspondents.

“Every year, we import three million tonnes of rice. So if we were to change the way we consume, we would be exporting seven million tonnes of rice.”

And he has been practising what he preaches.

“In the last few weeks, I’ve stopped eating rice at dinners and I’ve started eating singkong or cassava for breakfast and I have not eaten more vegetables or meat in substitution for rice,” he said, telling people to note that — as a bonus — he has lost weight since switching to the tubers.

But the Harvard-educated minister, who also heads the Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board, faces an uphill task.

A presidential instruction calling for a ‘one day without rice’ campaign in 2009 ordered the country’s 33 provinces to diversify their food production, based on their agricultural potential. Some regional leaders, such as West Java Governor Ahmad Heryawan, finally tried to implement that last July, moving to a lunch menu of boiled chopped tubers and corn with different side dishes.

Although such programs have been tried for decades, rice consumption continues to rise with the growing population.

Agriculture Minister Suswono, who supports such moves, was quoted as saying: “There’s a saying in Indonesia that if you haven’t eaten rice during the day, you haven’t eaten at all. So we need to educate our population.”

Beyond the rhetoric, economic factors are at play. In a report last June, British aid group Oxfam said the prices of staples like rice could rise by 80 percent by 2030. And observers say the hardest hit will be small farmers and poorer Indonesians, who tend to eat the most rice.

Deputy Secretary-General of Asean S. Pushpanathan told The Straits Times in an interview last year: “In Indonesia, 75 percent of the poor are rice eaters, according to a World Bank assessment. So an increase in the price of rice by 10 percent, will result in an additional two million poor people, or around 1 percent of the population.”

Indonesia was self-sufficient in rice production from 2008 to 2009, but started to import the grain to maintain its reserves in 2010, after a failure to meet harvest targets.

The government hopes to boost production this year, to ease the escalating prices of food and achieve food security amid global uncertainty.

Think tank National Economic Committee recommended that the government reform agriculture by opening up new farming areas, increasing productivity and intensifying plantations.

The Agriculture Ministry has taken heed, also putting a lot of effort into research that has resulted in it developing 200 rice varieties, almost doubling productivity, said Suswono.

Still, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals report showed that about half of Indonesia’s small-scale farming households remain undernourished.

And Tejo Wahyu Jatmiko of the Alliance for Prosperous Villages said: “Indonesia’s farmers often work on small plots of land, they have little formal education and they use up to 85 percent of their own money to manage the land.”

For poor farmers, rice is the easiest option, so he noted: “If you want to get Indonesians to eat less rice, you have to ensure that this doesn’t run counter to poverty reduction efforts.”

Reprinted courtesy of Straits Times Indonesia. To subscribe to Straits Times Indonesia and/or the Jakarta Globe call 021 2553 5055.