Journal article
Lumbung nation: metaphors of food security in Indonesia
Graeme MacRae, Thomas Reuter
INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD | ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD | Published : 2020
Abstract
Indonesian food security policy suffers from a fundamental internal contradiction–between neoliberal pressures towards more integration into the global market-based food system geared towards profit and an intractable residual belief in national self-sufficiency in staple foods. While this contradiction presents itself in technical and economic terms, it is fundamentally a matter of culture and ideology. The article addresses this contradiction by way of a study of key metaphors of food security, among which the most central is lumbung–the traditional rice barn. Lumbung of various kinds have been a central pillar of food security across the archipelago since ancient times and still serve in ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This article is based primarily on periods of field research (both joint and separate) by the two authors in Bali and central Java/Yogyakarta in mid 2017, 2018 and 2019, but is more broadly grounded in over two decades of wide-ranging ethnographic work by the authors in both Bali and central Java. Our current research project, 'Food security in Indonesia: a moral-economy approach', is funded by the Australian Research Council, while previous research has been partly funded by Auckland, Massey, ANU and Melbourne Universities. Thanks are due to many friends, colleagues and anonymous farmers in Bali and Java and also to two anonymous reviewers for IMW.