Cash crops, food crops, and sustainability: The case of Indonesia

Abstract Recent evidence suggests that the main obstacle to sustainable agricultural development is the failure of any economic policy, whether promoting food crops or exports, to address adequately problems of natural resource management. Policies to achieve food self- sufficiency may therefore by neither inherently more nor inherently less environmentally sustainable than export-oriented agricultural development. Indonesia serves as a useful illustration, as the country's pursuit of both food self-sufficiency and export crop promotion strategies has encountered many problems of environmental and resource degradation. Overcoming these problems will require the explicit integration of natural resource management concerns within the economic policy framework for Indonesian agriculture.