YOGYAKARTA – The province of Yogyakarta Special Region is suffering from a deficit in food supports due to land conversion from agricultural land to residential. The support is low at 0.773, showing that the rice production cannot meet all the food requirement for all people in the province. “Current production can only meet up to 77.3% of 3.5 millions of total population,” said the lecturer of Area Development Planning department in the Faculty of Geography UGM, Andri Kurniawan, S.Si., M.Si., in his open doctoral examination on Wednesday (26/6).
Every year the province needs an additional 106 thousand of tonnes of rice stocks which have to be brought in from other regions.
Kurniawan said the low food support in the province is caused by the limited agricultural lands, generally, not more than 100 thousands of hectares or 30% of all areas. “The figure does not suffice to produce all the rice required by the people,” he said.
Land conversion has led to the limited size, this is the impact of spatial urbanisation, especially in the suburban, not to mention that not all agricultural lands have high productivity. Some have low productivity, particularly in some areas in Gunung Kidul and Kulon Progo, which are rainwater catchment agricultural lands.
Of all regencies and municipality here, Kurniawan continues, the rice production in Sleman is a surplus at 26.8 thousands of tonnes annually. The surplus can supply rice to other regencies suffering from a deficit.
In addition, bioecology or land resource also suffers from a land resource deficit at 0.085 hectares global per capita. Meanwhile other supporting resources, water, air, residential, goods and waste and service are still high.
In the future, said Kurniawan, arrangement of land use composition and supporting components needs to be done to reach a balance.
Spatial planning is key in the effort to reach regional supporting balance so it is able to increase development sustainability by paying attention to psycho-cultural and psycho-social aspects. “The principle of ecoefficiency is very important in using resources,” he said.