Although Indonesia has enough food to feed its people, it lacks variety beyond rice and tastes are changing as the country becomes wealthier, writes Context (by Thompson Reuters Foundation) in a piece on agricultural production of cassava in light of environmental needs and climate change.
About half the world’s population depends on rice as a staple food, but it is a water-intensive crop that has far higher emissions of greenhouse gases than cassava.
Cassava can also be grown across Indonesia and be harvested all year around, though it is time-consuming to prepare and has a stigma – at least in Asia – of being a poor person’s food, said Claudia Ringler, director of Natural Resources and Resilience at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
But despite cassava‘s promise, she said Indonesia had taken the “lazy way out” by cutting down tropical forests to convert them for agriculture [large cassava plantations].
“It’s not very difficult to make the case that putting a cassava plantation in the middle of the jungle is not needed for food security,” Ringler said of the Borneo cassava project, calling instead for greater efficiency on existing farmland.
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Republished by Reuters, Devidiscourse, Business World Online.