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A top-down agricultural reform programme in Indonesia turns into a bottom-up movement for political accountability and agricultural change
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Integrated pest management (IPM) emerged in Indonesia in the late 1980s as a reaction to the environmental and social consequences of the new agricultural practices that have become known as the Green Revolution. At its height during the 1970s and 80s, the shift from small-scale subsistence farming to cultivation of varieties of food and cash crops requiring expensive inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, affected rural people all over the industrialising world.
Following fifteen years during which pesticides had become subject to annual subsidies of over US$100 million a year, a devastating pest outbreak of the brown plant hopper on the Indonesian rice harvest of 1986 forced the national government to introduce a strategy that moved away from pesticide use towards methods of pest control based on combining external expertise with the farmers' own knowledge of their fields. A co-operative programme between the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Indonesian government centred on Farmer Field Schools (FFS).
These Schools contained elements of conventional training in methods such as agro-ecosystem analysis, using diagrams generated by smallholder farmers to help them examine different factors affecting their crops. More importantly, however, the Schools also aimed to support and develop farmers' expertise in their own fields, enabling them to replace their reliance on external inputs such as pesticides with indigenous skills, knowledge and resources. Over time the emphasis of the programme shifted towards community organisation and planning of integrated pest management, and became known as Community IPM.
The adoption of Community IPM through Farmer Field Schools has spread to more than one million rice farmers in Indonesia. It might be expected that such "scaling up" of a successful practice could only occur via a shift in policy by national policy-makers, followed by incentives for farmers to change their practices. However, one of the key lessons from Indonesia , a country with a fragile democratic system that did not allow public meetings of any kind, is the extent to which Schools of 20 and more people were initially allowed and then gradually organised into farmers' unions, which forced a reluctant government to change not only agricultural but other policies related to rural technologies, livelihoods and governance.
Community IPM demonstrates that participatory approaches to technology development can be institutionalised by the participants themselves, given an environment that removes political oppression and provides safe spaces for discussion. Farmer groups and associations have now developed their own organisational and advocacy functions, and so are able to bring about pro-farmer policy changes at national and local government level. There are fears that trends to increase ?corporate farming' will reduce access to markets for smallholder farmers and increase poverty and environmental degradation. There are also market constraints to further enabling IPM. Farmers are currently not permitted to market products as "pesticide free or low/zero residue", which would facilitate market access.
With Farmer Field Schools and their associated political movements having begun to raise the awareness of Indonesian policy-makers about the perspectives of their country's farmers, many have the potential to become a vehicle for broader issues such as corporate accountability. The combination of top-down consultation and bottom-up farmers movements has been a pioneering example of mutualistic engagement.