Skip to content Skip to sidebar Skip to footer

Indonesia’s Rice Dependence: An International Political Economy Perspective

In February 2024 Indonesia faced a food crisis when the price of rice reached the historical high of IDR 18.000 per Kg (Nugroho, 2024). With the rapid price increase severely impacting lower-class families, the State-owned Logistics Bureau (BULOG) sold the Country’s rice reserve at a lower price; citizens queued for hours to buy the subsidised rice (BBC-Indonesia, 2024) a phenomenon reflecting the fragility of Indonesia’s Food Security.

Being the staple food for more than 3.5Billion of Asia’s population (Devkota et al., 2019; FAO 2018) rice affects Global Food Security. A population’s daily consumption of rice (Stanley, 2023) requires constant supply and any disruption risks a nation’s food security. Indonesia is the world’s third-largest consumer of rice with an average of 124 kg of rice per person per year (Subejo, 2024; Shahbandeh, 2024), is also the third largest producer…

Read the full article…