Mar 17 2010

Dynamic Model of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) for Strengthening a Food Security in Indonesia

Published by at 11:44 am under System Analysis in Agriculture

Indonesia is one of agricultural countries in the world that has significant role to endow with rich agricultural potentials. Furthermore, agricultural sector plays a big role in forming Gross National Income and also plays a role in supplying food and industrial raw materials. Refers to the Indonesian Government Policy, this sector can make an equal development through the endeavor of poverty reduction and the improvement of people’s income. The role of food supplier is to achieve food self-sufficiency. Therefore, there is a need to revitalize agriculture in a wider sense throughout Indonesia. One alternative to achieve the national target is innovating technology in agricultural production system.
Related to the aforementioned, the study is focused on dynamic model development of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) for strengthening a food security in Indonesia. In general terms, the SRI is a method of increasing the yield of rice produced in farming system. This technology also improves productivity of land, labor, capital and water simultaneously. Recently, many methods of the SRI are being implemented in some countries with difference of circumstances and treatments.
Implementing the study was considered on some facts that particularly natural resources availability for agriculture will become scarce commodity in the future. Furthermore, demand for rice is increasing with population growth. Thus, any activities to increase rice productivity with less in-natural resource consumption will be important for sustainable food security. For developing the model, mechanism of the research can be described as follows; (i) identifying key variables and its behavior in the system, (ii) developing inter-relationship among key variables in the form of mathematical formulations, (iii) programming the model by using dynamic system based application software, and then simulating, (iv) validating the model to improve performance of the model.
The model was tested in some provinces, e.g. Yogyakarta, Central Java and East Java. For testing the model, three methods were compared i.e. organic SRI, inorganic SRI and conventional method. Results of the study indicated that the developed SRI model can improve significantly rice yield ranged 1.5 to 2 times compare to the conventional method.

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