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Famine in Indonesia 1950s 60s [1]

[]

Date: 2012-09-16

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All Lies? Famines in Sukarno’s Indonesia, 1950s-1960s 1. Introduction

Much is known about the big 20

th

century famines in Asia, such as in Vietnam during 1944-45 (Gunn 2011), the 1959-61 China famine (

e.g.

Johnson 1998; Chen and Zhou, 2007), the famines in Bengal in 1942-44 and Bangladesh in 1973-74. But little is known about 20

th

century famines in another large Asian country: Indonesia. For example, Ó Gráda (2007 and 2009) does not mention them at all, even though Indonesia experienced a massive famine in the densely populated core island of Java during 1944-45 (Van der Eng 1998a, 2008), and the fact that several studies analysed occasional regional famines during the Dutch colonial era (Brennan

et al.

1984; Van der Eng 2004; Fernando 2010). Indonesia’s independence from colonial rule in the 1940s did not relegate famines in the country to the dustbin of history. Arguably, only the spread of the Green Revolution in rice agriculture since the late-1960s achieved that. Indonesian newspapers reported occasional famines throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but faced government restrictions on its reporting to the extent that in December 1963, President Sukarno openly denied reports of famines in foreign media, calling them ‘lies, all lies’.

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Consequently, with the exception of the famine in Lombok in 1966 (Brennan

et al.

1984), these famines have hitherto not been studied. The purpose of this paper is to establish the frequency and magnitude of these famines in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s and explain why they occurred. Section 2 will garner some of the evidence that exists on the famine situation during these decades. Section 3 will discuss the systemic reasons that may help to understand the reasons for these famines: population growth, natural disasters, food production shortfalls, a break-down of the supply chain, and hoarding caused by inflation. While combinations of these factors are relevant to a degree to particular famine-struck regions in the country, Section 4 will argue that the most serious problems were caused by the increasing control that government agencies sought to exercise over markets for rice and other food crops, which took away incentives for surplus production and made it impossible for the free market to alleviate supply s hortfalls in deficit areas. Section 5 concludes.

2. Famines in Indonesia, 1950s-1960s

There are two likely reasons why the famines that plagued Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s are not well-known in the country’s economic historiography. One is that ‘famine’ (

kelaparan

in Indonesian or

hongersnood

in Dutch) is an emotive term that

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The Straits Times

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[1] Url: https://www.scribd.com/document/132785022/20120916-Famine-in-Indonesia-1950s-60s

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