Where Do Our Local Food Comes From (an interview in Festival Desa)

Last Sunday, I was assigned another challenge, which is to go to Ragunan, where a festival called "Festival Desa" was held. The topics there are all organic and local, as this festival aims to introduce people more to healthier foods. I had to interview a comitee and a booth. For the comitee, I have to find the reason why the festival was held, and for the booth, to find the reason why they sold each particular merchandise and find any interesting thing about it.

The first booth I visited was a booth of organic rice. The man that I interviewed was Pak Joharipin. He and his friends fight for the rights of local farmers to make their own seedling. Why? Because since the rule of former president Soeharto, all crop farmers should use hybrid seedlings that makes them depend on certain seedling companies. Chemical fertilizers and pesticide included.

Pak Joharipin mentioned that there are two kinds of seedlings. The first is inbred, and the other one is hybrid. Inbred seedlings are seeds that were carefully selected. They were saved and passed from generations to generations. While Hybrid seedlings were created in labs using high tech methods, as the seeds from hybrid plants won't produce uniform offspring, farmer must buy new seeds each time they want to plant.

How they fight are by developing local seeds for their own seedling and educating farmers by making "Sekolah Lapangan".

And this is the rice that we bought from Pak Joharipin.

The second booth that I visited was a booth from Kehati (Keaneka Ragaman Hayati), who introduced us to the variations of staple food that our ancestors used. We abandoned that tradition because of the rule from former President Soeharto to plant/eat rice, which wasn't their main local staple food. While actually, not all of the Indonesian land are suitable for planting rice, forcing them to buy the hybrid seedlings.

From the booth, I saw many kinds of flour such as banana flour, arrowroot flour, Sago flour, etc. The only absent flour was the wheat flour, as wheat couldn't grow here. The wheat are all imported.

This is buckwheat, a substitute for sugar. It has the same amount of sweetness, but less calories.

This is the buckwheat sugar.

Noodles made out of sago flour instead of wheat flour.

Buckwheat brownies.

Buckwheat brownies recipe

Various dried foods made from non-wheat flour.

The third person that I interviewed was Pak Tejo Wahyu Jatmiko, the head comittee. The reason why this annual festival is held is to make a "direct" connection between the food producer (farmers), and the consumers (in the city). This is the 5th time the annual festival was held.

Food is very important so we have to be independent on making our own local supply. One example of the danger of depending on other country was when Thailand got a massive flood that ruined their harvest, causing us not to get our food order, as they still have to feed themselves (although we've paid them). In the other hand, we cannot postpone our need.

From Pak Tejo, I knew that in the world, around the 1960s (and the 1970s in Indonesia), there's a movement called Green Revolution. The movement was said to raise more yield, and yes, there's more yield, but at the same time, it makes us dependent on other country's supplies for the seedlings and we are heavily in debt (for the building of water dams, large amounts of chemical fertilizer supplies, etc. etc) It was aimed to avoid the spread of Communism (it was during the cold war) and the theory was that people who were hungry were prone to rebelling (influenced by Communism/Uni Soviet). To prevent it, the US scientists improved the seeds in labs to raise the yield, so there would be more food. The improved seeds that we call hybrid, are "spoiled", as they want their surroundings to be exactly like the lab (more water, more chemical fertilizer, pesticide, etc. etc.) in the field, while originally, they could cope with the surroundings easily.

This Green Evolution concludes in a big factory that occupies 75% of the world's seedling supplies.

Conclusion:
I learned that I have to appreciate our local food more and the diversity of food. Besides that, I also learned about the hidden agenda behind the "amazing" Green Revolution movement.