Author:Purwiyatno Hariyadi
ABSTRACT
Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. There are four aspects of food security; (i) food availability, (ii) stability of supplies, (iii) access to supplies, and (iv) food utilization, which eventually leads to the embodiment of healthy and active individual. Concept of food security can be applied to measure government’s performance in assuring the people’s access to food; however, it is not always positively correlated with national soverignty. Hypothetically, despite its ability in ensuring availability and access to high quality, safe and nutritious foods for its people, a country can still potentially experience “(food) insecurity” especially with regards to its dependency on imported food. Consequently, there is a need for more fundamental understanding of national food security and its correlation to social, cultural and political systems and national economy, leading to development of concept of food sovereignty. Concept of food sovereignty recognize the fact that it is a must for a country to develop its own national food system, that suits the conditions of the available resources, in terms of its environment (including natural, social and cultural environment), technology (including daily habits and other practices) and human resources. Adoption of food sovereignty concept should urge the government to seriously look into its local potential related to staple foods that suits their natural and cultural environment. This will promote food diversification at which each region will create regional food security that conforms to the regional potential. Food diversification is essential to reduce the high dependency on rice and to boost the development of local food resources. Food technology, in particular, has to play an important role in developing food diversification based on local resources that will contribute to the development of food sovereignty in the national level. There are several critical issues of food diversification that need to be addressed, including: (i) efforts in exploration and using the potential of the best local material, (ii) improvement and application of cultivation technology, processing and packaging, (iii) application of the food industrialization concept; and especially (iv) institutional innovation to promote participation of local community in food production system. Industrialization of local-based foods should promote community participation and create added value in such a way that the local food product has a better value than, or at least the same with rice-based food products (and wheat) which are currently dominating traditional Indonesian menus. Creating added value is a challenge for food technologists. Research to explore the unique characteristics and functionalities of local foods, to identify and map local preferences and consumers habits, for example, should be conducted intensively.