Institut Teknologi Bandung

Condition Analysis of Agriculture in Indonesia

The team wrote that agriculture remains on of the main economic sectors in Indonesia. "Agricultural land in Indonesia reached 82.71% of total land area (Data taken from the Ministry of Secretariat of the State, 2010) with a population of 30.5% livelihood in the agricultural sector (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2013). But, Fact tells that poverty in Indonesia is concentrated in rural areas, where the main economic sector is agriculture. This shows that the management of the agricultural sector is still lacking the welfare of rural communities," they stated in the Abstract section.

According to writers, things that obstruct improvement of the welfare of agricultural community is the institutional problembs. Limitations in agricultural institutions led to inefficient supply chain between producers and consumers . Therefore , team is motivated to propose the idea of ​​appropriate technology for the sake of simplification of the agricultural supply chain .

Simplify Supply Chain of Agriculture with Online Apps

In order to improve the agricultural supply chain, the team propose a food supply chain with online-based system as a solution. This application could then be used to empower the local farming community. The system has it's ease in access to information of supply-demand that designed to be managed independently by the people who joined in those local farming community.

Why should empower the farming community? Team said, "The absence of collective systems directly from the farmers causing involvement of many actors and transactions, it ultimately increases the price of agricultural products and makes it not transparent. The problem caused by such things as the lack of coordination between producers and market players in taking the product, the accessbillity of production site to the consumer, post-harvest storage constraints, and the presence of middlemen who can set the price of stapple food before it reached the hands of consumers."

Innovation of online food supply chain means the marketing system of agricultural products is operated online with internet-based infrastructure. According to the team, the national consumer now begin to turn their interest to online shopping style. Thus, farming community can take advantage of this opportunity to meet customer needs more effectively and efficiently.

One particular concern of the team is to minimize the involvement of  "stakeholders" who informally organized agricultural commodity prices. With the online application, price transparency can be maintained so that consumer's trust increased. Finally, losses are often experienced by farmers due to the longness of supply chain can be reduced optimally.

Keep Moving Forward

Team claimed that they were deeply motivated to join competition and submit their ideas because of thirst for experience. "Beside of that, we are motivated also by our Kahim (Chairman of the Student Association, -red) that always encourage us to spread out the usefulness of HMP (Association of Planology Students). So, by armed with our engineering disciplines in regional and rural planning that we have, we initiate to enroll in this competition," said Maryam. They also learned a lot about how to package idea interestingly.

Maryam expressed a wish to realize the idea that they convey trough writing. "But we are aware, to be able to realize this idea, we will need more knowledge, patience, and long time enough. And hope for the future is that the idea can be manifasted as one of the solution for the improvement of agricultural condition in Indonesia," said Maryam.