Rice and Circus in East Timor

With the regional and global spike in food prices it is naturally imperative that East Timor corner crucial sources of food, joining a queue of food deficit countries from the Philippines to Singapore. But how and why has East Timor - a land of subsistence agriculturalists and one of the world's poorest nations- been turned into a net food importer? And what is the future of East Timor's agriculture? The answers are complex but we are reminded of the "Timor problem" described Dutch geographer F.J. Ormeling in the mid-1950s in a book of the same name, a reference to Timor's delicate environmental niche including highly invariant rainfall, that always threatens to breach self-sufficiency. Apparently the food security "problem" was not understood by the World Bank which, from 1999 to 2002, prioritized irrigated rice development over and above East Timor's traditional basket of staples of which corn was dominant. Indonesian rule after the 1975 invasion did extend wet-field rice, but they also left the rice paddies abandoned in 1999. With the crisis apparent, FAO in East Timor has only belatedly acknowledged the need to address non-rice agriculture. The "problem" today, as addressed by Douglas Kammen, is that East Timor faces down the curse of other states drawing upon hydrocarbon rents for quick fixes, namely that it is cheaper to import just about everything - food included - and that agriculture - the life and blood of the country for millennium - is left to the market or to wither. But as Kammen also stresses, problems of overcoming cronyism and corruption at the interface of state and market are central to East Timor's future. This is the third in a continuing series on the world food crisis. See Walden Bello, How to manufacture a global food crisis: The destruction of agriculture in developing countries; C. Peter Timmer, Japan and a Solution to the World Rice Crisis Japan Focus

Ancient history · Geography · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs