Widodo urges smallholder agri amid global food shortage
Published on: Friday, June 24, 2022
By: Tempo
JAKARTA: President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) (pic), has called for people to start cultivating various types of crops across unattended fields which would prove useful to mitigate the negative effects of the global food supply chain disruptions.“I would like to add one thing, please tell the people that current times must not see unattended fields not being cultivated,” said the President in his opening speech at the PMKRI congress event at East Kalimantan on June 22, Antara News reported.
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He then urged for smallholder agriculture on crops that can be quickly produced such as corn and cassava as being self-sufficient will strengthen Indonesia’s food source security and better in fending off pressure from the global scale.
The President also mentioned natural disasters that can disrupt the production and availability of food goods both globally and domestically.
“The easy thing is that corn can be harvested in 3 months, cassava has also been harvested for 3 months. Plant it quickly because we don’t know the situation [in the future], climate change, and others,” Jokowi said.
In January 2022 there were only three countries that stopped food exports to meet domestic needs. Meanwhile, in mid-June 2022, the number of countries that stopped food exports increased to 23 because each country wanted to maintain food stocks to meet domestic needs.
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