Lumbung nation: metaphors of food security in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesian food security policy suffers from a fundamental internal contradiction–between neoliberal pressures towards more integration into the global market-based food system geared towards profit and an intractable residual belief in national self-sufficiency in staple foods. While this contradiction presents itself in technical and economic terms, it is fundamentally a matter of culture and ideology. The article addresses this contradiction by way of a study of key metaphors of food security, among which the most central is lumbung–the traditional rice barn. Lumbung of various kinds have been a central pillar of food security across the archipelago since ancient times and still serve in many contexts as a metaphor for food security at various levels. While this ‘lumbung culture’ may have ‘hindered’ attempts to integrate Indonesia more fully into wider circuits of market exchange, it has to some extent protected the Indonesian food system from the growing vulnerabilities of climate, resource/environmental stresses, and pandemics.