Biotechnology and Increased Production

Over the past two decades, the rate of productivity growth in Indonesia’s strategic food very slowly. In the last 14 years (1996-2010), the productivity of rice grown under 1 percent per year. Soybean productivity growth is stagnant, if not negative to say. In the decade of the 1990s, reaching 1.7 tons of soybean productivity per hectare, but now only 1.4 tons of soybean productivity per hectare. Sugarcane productivity growth is not patterned, sometimes high up to 6.2 tonnes per hectare cut glass, but sometimes dropped to below 5.8 tons per hectare. Only maize showed consistently increased productivity almost doubled. The phenomenon of productivity as well as showing a pattern of inconsistency and strategic food production systems in Indonesia.

Agricultural production capacity in Indonesia, but was low since the beginning, also experience fatigue due to a systematic pattern of cultivation, growing environment, and the inefficiency of the scale of farm production. Farmers as the main actors have limitations in managing and modifying the biophysical and socio-economic environment of agricultural production systems. Farmers is very difficult to be able to influence the policy environment, let alone to change the macroeconomic foundation, which determines the level of welfare. At the same level of capacity, setting cultivation techniques, pest and disease control, and irrigation water management is only able to increase agricultural production to the degree necessary. By contrast, if increased production capacity, especially if combined with measures of intensification, agricultural production will jump many times. The story of corn on top jump in productivity can not be removed from use and adoption of hybrid corn seed. In short, innovation and technological change, including the development and utilization of agricultural biotechnology, will be able to increase production capacity and productivity of agriculture.

Agricultural biotechnology, the products also include hybrid and genetically modified products, is expected to provide a significant spike in food production. In the language of economics, biotechnology it is technological change that is “capable of production shifts to the top” so that production capacity increases. On a normal process, the community can make step adjustments and a new equilibrium resulting in a new institutional culture and to use or interact with the products of biotechnology.