The integration of food markets and increasing government intervention in Indonesia: 1815-1980s

This chapter presents a long-term view on how communities, markets and governments in Indonesia coped with restricted access to food and volatile food prices. It focuses on the role of colonial and postcolonial governments whose interventions were driven by concerns over social stability in the countryside. The chapter examines how communal landholding, patron–client systems and crop diversification had enhanced famine resilience, although this was partly undone by the enormous expansion of colonial cash production under the Cultivation System. It provides reduced food self-sufficiency, and culminated in the famines of the late 1840s. The chapter analyzes how the colonial government shocked by the famines — which were caused by lack of food entitlement and not by food shortages as such — tried to encourage the emergence of a market with sufficient rice at a reasonable price. It also focuses on Java, where the vast majority of the Indonesian population has been living.