Farming, Gender and Aspirations across Young People's Life Course

Drawing on life history interviews conducted in Indian and Indonesian study sites, we tease out the social production of aspirations in the process of becoming a farmer. We show the power of a doxic logic in which schooling is regarded as the pathway out of farming, towards a future of non-manual, salaried employment. Among rural youth this doxic logic produces broadly defined aspiration such as ‘completing education’, and ‘getting a job’. In the absence of clear pathways to realise such aspirations, young people seek to keep options open. Yet, the scope for doing so changes in relation to key life events such as ending school, migration and marriage and does so in distinctly gendered ways. We conclude proposing that young people’s delayed entrance into farming, among other things, must be understood as an attempt to keep open those futures that are considered closed by an early entry into full-time farming

Reforming Policies for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Indonesia

Including micro firms, SMEs are responsible for more than 97 percent of total employment in Indonesia and represent 99 percent of all firms. The Indonesian government has tried to assist SMEs through programmes, such as subsidised credit, one-stop shops to lower business registration costs and government-sponsored trade fairs. However, there is little evidence on how effective these programmes are or on ways to improve government policies aimed at helping SMEs. We conducted structured interviews with 192 firms across five provinces in Indonesia to investigate the constraints that firms face and how existing programmes do – or do not – help reduce these constraints. We conclude the report with policy recommendations targeted at the Indonesian government and other stakeholders, focusing on the importance of credit and on the need to remove information barriers

Sistem Pertanian Padi Indonesia Dalam Perspektif Efisiensi Sosial

This report summarizes some of thefindings of AKATIGA's study on food self-sufficiency relating to changesin small-scale rice farming systems in 12 rice-producing villages. Small-scale farming in this study is examined in relation to the social efficiency framework, which focuses on the equitable distribution of resources and assesses policies and their outcomes in relation to their contribution to society's developmental goals.This study found that many common assumptions made by today's agricultural research and policy community in Indonesia need to be scrutinized. These include the relationship between farm size and productivity,, the inequality of the existing agrarian structure, and the impact of agricultural technology on employment and income distribution.One cause for concern is the high degree of concentration of ownership and control of land in rice-producing villages. Large-scale land ownership does not generate large-scale farms but an increase in the number of share-tenants and lease-tenants. Even very small farms can produce high yields, and there is some indication that within the ‘smallholder' sector,yields on smaller farms are higher than on larger farms. Land tenure status does not appear to significantly affect yields.The most common constraint to productivity is pest damage (in all villages, but most of all in those villages that have abandoned synchronised planting), and in some villages chronic flooding.Farmers are highly dependent on external inputs and generally on powerful local actors to obtain them, often in debt relationships.Various new technologies and practices (Atabela transplating machines, direct planting, and combine harvesters) do not increase per hectare productivity but reduce labour opportunities in transplanting and harvesting, which remain important sources of income for the landless and near-landless, particularly women