by AKATIGA and BEN WHITE
Working in a rice mill, South Sulawesi – Charina Chazali
Afar (29) is the son of a tenant rice farmer in Wajo, South Sulawesi. He works as a garment trader in the Bombana mining region of Northeast Sulawesi, several hours and a ferry crossing away from home. He has no ambition to follow in his parents’ footsteps. ‘It’s better to be a trader than a landless farmer. If you’re a tenant on someone else’s land you have to start work early in the morning, you’d be ashamed if the owner sees you going to the fields late in the day. But if you have your own land and feel a bit lazy, you can be as late as you like.’ Another disadvantage of farming, he says, is the high risks involved, particularly harvest failure and unstable prices.
Agriculture, and small-scale farming in particular, is still the biggest single source of employment for young people in rural areas. But all over Indonesia – as in many other countries, both rich and poor – one hears people saying that ‘young people aren’t interested in farming’. Farmers themselves often say they hope their children will find better work than farming. Does this mean there will be no next generation of smallholder farmers to produce rice and other food for Indonesia’s growing population?
Turning away from farming?
Researchers in the Bandung-based non-government organisation (NGO) Akatiga have been studying these issues since 2013, in 12 rice-producing villages in West Java, Central Java and South Sulawesi. We talked with young men and women between the ages of 13 and 30 from different backgrounds. Some were children of landowners, others from smallholder, tenant farmers or landless families. When we look closely at these rural young people’s views and hopes, the picture is quite complex, as the stories below from young people in South Sulawesi demonstrate.
Ami (17) is a high school student whose father has a relatively large three-hectare farm, but only owns one-third of the land. She has never helped her father on the farm. She hopes to go to college away from home in Makassar, to study accounting or economics and then to get a job in a bank. But her mother prefers that she go to college in the nearby district town of Sengkang. Ami anticipates that when she is married, she will want to come back to live in the village, where her mother can help look after her children. Her new boyfriend wants to join the police. But if he doesn’t succeed and becomes a farmer, she can accept that: ‘So long as I can do whatever work I choose, and he can make a living by farming so we don’t have to borrow money, that won’t be a problem.’
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