Could Agro-ecology Be Applied in Indonesia?
Some agricultural experts said that the agro-ecology agriculture was the best solusion to suppress the global warming and to reduce the use of chemicals. But the pros and cons of the agro-ecology application in Indonesia evolved because of the lack of land owned by Indonesian farmers.
For the reason, the Board of Professors (DGB) of IPB held Studium General presented the speaker of Prof. Miguel A. Altieri, from University of California, Berkeley USA. He was the professor in the field of Agro-ecology in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management (ESPM), UC, Berkeley. The event which was held in the Senate Room of IPB (14/6) raised the topic of “Who will feed us in the planet in crisis?”
“As one example, Pretty and Hine (2009) has evaluated 16 agro-ecology projects spreading in eight Asian countries and found that 2.86 millions households substantially have raised the food production at 4.93 million hectares. With the application of agro-ecology, I think it can become the world’s food bag and can suppress the global warming, ” Prof, Miguel explained in his presentation.
System of Rice Intensification (SRI) was one ways of rice cultivation with the approach of agro-ecology. This sytem had spread in China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam and had reached more than million hectares of land with the average yield increase around 20-30%. The excellence of SRI which had been demonstrated in more than 40 countries in the world was the yield increase of more than 50%, the reduction of the use of seed to 90%, and the reduction of the use of water to 50%.
Meanwhile, Prof. Hidayat Pawitan, Professor of Geophysics and Meteorology of IPB, as one of participants who were present, said that the agro-ecology approach was said to be able to give the intelligent solution for suppressing the global warming but requiring large farms.
“Need to be considered again if this system will be applied in Indonesia, because it will be hampered by land problem. Mostly Indonesian farmers are small farmers with limited land,” he said.(zul)
