The political economy of agro-food restructuring in Indonesia in the 1990s

My dissertation, The Political Economy of Agro-food Restructuring in Indonesia in the 1990s, examines agro-food system transformations in East Java in the 1990s. The 1990s was a period of remarkable change in Indonesia. In the early part of the decade, the Indonesian state was gradually restructuring the national economy towards greater liberalization. In the tatter part of the decade, the Asian financial crisis sent the Indonesia economy into a serious recession, and spread into a political crisis that ended President Suharto's 32-year New Order regime. An understanding of this period provides one with useful insights regarding the current issues affecting Indonesian agro-food systems and political economy.;More specifically, my dissertation contributes to the political economy of agro-food literature, which focused on the role of food and agriculture in the broad history of global capitalism and national regulatory structures (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; Friedmann 1991; Friedmann 2005; McMichael 1998). My dissertation draws on the politics of space literature (Brenner 1999; Brenner 2003), as well as the specific country studies literature that examines processes of agrarian transition at a local level (Hart 1986; Hart 1989; Li 1999; Rigg 2001; Breman and Wiradi 2002), in order to trace restructuring in Indonesian political economy across multiple spaces. In doing so, this dissertation enriches the historical approach, which has been effectively utilized in agro-food studies literature, by adding spatial perspectives to political economy analysis of agro-food systems and restructuring processes.;I contend that restructuring in the Indonesian case should be seen as a shift on the part of the Indonesian state to diversify away from a strong emphasis on protectionist agriculture towards an embrace of market-oriented solutions that depended on an increasing role for private sector actors. I draw primarily on the case of Taiwanese agriculture aid in East Java to show the high degree of state involvement (both from the Indonesian and Taiwanese sides) in remaking the spaces of local agro-food production systems in order to capture new markets in horticultural products such as the "wood ear mushroom". However, processes of restructuring were continually contested by diverse social agents that included peasant farmers and private capital, and this became most visible when such processes are examined across different scales.;My analysis is based on a village case study that explores the relationships between local agricultural production, national policies and transnational patterns of agricultural aid and investment. In the dissertation, I argue that processes of agro-food restructuring in the Indonesian case are dependent on state agency and strategies to remake production spaces across a range of scales. With this argument, the dissertation builds on, and contributes to scholarship in international political economy, geography and rural sociology.