Work Packages

This part of the project explores the effectiveness of various instruments to enhance the adoption of organic farming practices and the socio economic-impacts of adoption. To avoid self-selection effects, this work package will use randomized field experiments and expose farmers to alternative treatments that either (i) address awareness of organic products, their health benefits and available marketing channels or (ii) increase practical knowledge by offering training of organic farming practices. These interventions will be randomized at the village and not the individual level to limit the chance of unwanted spillovers. Some villages will receive no intervention and form the control group. Follow-up interventions may also address consumer awareness and demand. The study targets villages in the Yogyakarta and the Bogor region. In total about 1,200 households will be sampled. A baseline and a follow-up survey after one year will be collected. Further, qualitative research partly also from the other work packages will provide more detail on the underlying behavioral mechanism and thereby complement the findings from the experiment. Conditional on adoption this study will also explore the socio-economic impacts including impacts on income and food security in the short and medium term of adopters relative to non-adopters. The assessment of these benefits will also provide a basis for cost-benefit analyses with the objective of informing a more efficient upscaling phase later on.

The diversity of cultivated plants and animal breeds is fundamental to the principles and techniques of organic farming. By combining, rotating and intercropping cultivars and selecting certain traits in husbandry and plant production, farmers adapt to environmental conditions increasingly influenced by climate change. The workpackage aims at documenting and analysing the social institutions that evolved around crops and animals. The gendered organisation of knowledge management around the materiality of seeds, seedlings and animals is central to this analysis inspired by feminist political ecology. Negotiations at the intraface will be observed by conducting qualitative research via interviews, participatory methods and focus group discussions in Bogor and Yogyakarta. The results hope to inform policies to support biodiversity in the agricultural sector to enhance food sovereignty in the face of climate change.

Agrobiodiversity exists at the interface between nature and culture as the different seeds and breeds are an outcome of centuries of men’s’ and women’s’ handling of cultivars and animals according to their needs and environmental conditions. Thus, agrobiodiversity is an embodiment of agrarian culture or using the term coined by Donna Haraway (2016), an archetype of nature cultures, meaning that varieties cannot be only assigned to the sphere of nature or culture, but represents the outcome of a mutual conversation between biological framed concepts and culturally ascribed values and meanings. The workpackage is specifically interested in capturing the discourse and practice of collecting, exchanging and evaluating diversity in selected agricultural crops and farm animals to document natureculture relations and imagine their future within organic farming.

Haraway, Donna 2016: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene.Duke University Press, Durham

By analyzing the institution of organic farming in Indonesia, I am aiming to reveal the structure in which stakeholders articulate their motivations and goals, influences in decision making, and form different kinds of interactions.  Institution is understood as prescriptions, in the form of rules and regulations, which enable humans to coordinate repeated and structured interactions at various levels and contexts.  In addition, this analysis also considers the temporal variability of the development of organic farming and its association with diversity of actors and discourses.  Therefore, this research contributes to understanding the impacts of organic farming on livelihoods and sustainable food production. 

To achieve the aim of this research, I will consult official documents on organic farming policies and regulations, publications and records by NGOs, and documentations from organic producers and traders on their working principles.  In addition, I will conduct a one-year fieldwork in Yogyakarta in 2017 – 2018 where I engage extensively with the production process of organic products.  During this stay, I will interview government officials at different administrative levels, organic and non-organic farmers, academia, and organic consumers and distributors.  I will conduct Net-Map analysis with various stakeholders to visualize the connections between actors, the quality of these relationships, and the power to influence decision making process in relation to organic farming. 

The overall aim of the project is to shed light on the socio-cultural context of organic agriculture in Indonesia by investigating the principles of local organic farming practice and disclosing the ideas, values, and aspirations associated with such practice. To accomplish this aim, the study seeks to 1.) unpack the semantics of both organic and conventional agriculture; 2.) reveal the ideological context of organic farming; and 3.) describe organic farming practices within their broader livelihood contexts. By doing so, the study will not only provide an understanding of what it means to conduct organic agriculture in Indonesia both in a material and ideological sense, but, as such, add to comprehending of why some farmers adopt organic farming while others don’t. In order to unravel the multiple meanings of organic farming in the archipelago, I will conduct anthropological fieldwork in and around Bogor and Yogyakarta over several months. At the core of the anthropological method is participant observation, i.e. an immersive, inductive technique that involves engaging holistically in the everyday activities and interactions of the research participants in the course of small-scale, intensive fieldwork. While structured and structured interviews as well as focus group discussions will complement participant observation at the village level, policy research by means of a systematic review and content analysis of media coverage, official planning documents, and NGO reports together with semi-structured interviews with members of government bodies, NGOs, and academia will add to reveal the many meanings of organic agriculture in Indonesia.