Cassava in Indonesia: its Economic Role and Use as Food
Cassava, Manihot esculenta crantz, is not native to Southeast Asia. It was imported from the New World as were sweet potatoes, white potatoes, corn or maize, peanuts and tomatoes. The exact timing of this importation is not clear. One author suggested that cassava came to Java in Indonesia as early as the seventeenth century from the Moluccas1 while another author implied that cassava was introduced into Java in the later eighteenth century.2 At about the same time that cassava was arriving in Indonesia it also reached other parts of Asia. In 1786 cassava was reported in Ceylon after arriving via Mauritius; in 1794 it was planted in the East India Company's new botanic garden in Calcutta. Sir Stamford Raffles does not mention cassava in his History of Java,1 but he does mention other New World imports such as corn and sweet potatoes. While the use and spread of cassava has been fairly recent in many of the countries of Southeast Asia, it is now grown in all of them. However, it is a major agricultural product only in Thailand and Indonesia. Table 1 gives comparative details of cassava, rice, and corn for various Southeast Asian countries. Thailand's production of cassava is almost entirely exported to several of the European Common Market countries to be used as an animal feed; some quantities are also turned into starch. In Indonesia, however, cassava is a basic staple for the population. This paper examines the use of cassava as human food in Indonesia, how it is grown and processed, its nutritional aspects, the economics of the substitution between cassava and the other staples, and the possibilities of increasing demand and consumption of cassava in the future.
Cassava in Indonesia : A Historical Re-Appraisal of an Enigmatic Food Crop
Around 1900 the future of indigenous agriculture in densely populated Java was widely held to be gloomy. It was widely believed that rural prosperity was declining. The growing import of rice and the increasing share of maize and cassava in the diet of the Javanese were regarded as evidcnce fer the thesis that population growth was outpacing the growth of food supply ; Java was believed to be heading for a Malthusian catastrophe. Cassava has long been admonished as an inferior food crop and as poor people's food [e,g. Napitupulu 1968:65]. The increasing consumption of the tuber after 1900 is still interpreted as an indication of the declining standard of living in Indonesia [Booth 1988 : 332]. The increasing consumption of rice since the 1960s is widely regarded as an
Complexity, Network-Decisions And Alternative Risk Premia: Some New Theories Of Structural Change And Portfolio Decisions.
Structural Change is the basis for many decisions such as government fiscal and monetary policies, government interventions, corporate-expenditure decisions, corporate strategic decisions, portfolio management decisions in finance; household allocation decisions, etc.. Structural change in industries and national economies is increasingly more difficult to detect partly because of the growth and dominance of Complex Systems and “Networks” in modern industries and economies – such Networks and Complex Systems include GVCs (global value chains), retail store networks; franchising networks; internet networks; services networks; credit-chains in industries; online social networks; etc.. The relationship between Complexity and Structural Change is well established in the physics, applied math and economic dynamics literatures. Traditional definitions and modeling of structural change have erroneously focused on changes in labor, technological progress, market share, and or capital – which are grossly inadequate in the new economy and post- global financial crisis (as confirmed by changes in the global retailing and housing industries and other industries). Also the modeling of structural change seems to be constrained by the availability of data, and often omits the relationship between structural change on one hand, and globalization, financial stability and international financial contagion. This article: i) introduces the Operations Strategy Model of structural change, explains how it differs from the Lewis Model of Structural Change; and explains the often omitted relationship between operations strategy (of companies and government agencies) and structural change; ii) introduces other new Complexity-based models/theories of Structural Change in industries; iii) reviews the relationships among Operations Research, Complexity and Structural Change; iv) explains the symbiotic relationship between structural change on one hand, and economic growth, financial stability, financial contagion and globalization; v) discusses the significant gap between academic research and practice and explains some issues and factors that should be considered in the development and testing of structural change models; vi) explains how alternative risk premia can be generated from new models of Structural Change.