EMPOWERING SMALL-SCALE FARMERS-BASED TYPOLOGY TOWARDS GREEN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN INDONESIA
Muhammad Iqbal
Indonesian Center for Agricultural Socio Economic and Policy Studies (ICASEPS)
Jalan Ahmad Yani 70, Bogor 16161, West Java, Indonesia
ABSTRACT
It is believed that small-scale farmer is one of essential components in green economic development. In the case of Indonesia, there are approximately 14.25 million (55.33%) of farmers categorized as small-scale who have land tenure of less than 0.5 hectare averagely. Those farmers are necessarily empowered particularly towards green economic development. The study was conducted in December 2014 in two districts (Bandung and Garut) of West Java province. Three sub-districts were purposively selected representing typology of small-scale farmers. It was found that the empowerment of small-scale farmers should be based on its typology which can be clustered into three-group namely subsistence-oriented small-scale farmers, commercial small-scale farmers, and small-scale farmers in transition. Hence, it is recommended that the empowerment of subsistence typology focuses on optimizing the use of limited land size. Meanwhile, the empowerment of commercial typology is implemented through fostering the commercialization benefited for small-scale farmers. Moreover, the core empowerment of transition typology is in the form of improving the skill capacity supporting off-farm agriculture. Those should be initially started from capacity development through education and training both technical (farm operation) and non-technical (managerial) based on green economic development context. Indeed, it is necessary to involve young generation in order to keep sustaining the transformation of green economic development in Indonesia.
Keywords: small-scale farmers, typology, empowerment, green economic development, Indonesia