Graeme MacRae
3Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
Indonesia has had an agricultural extension system for over a century, reaching a peak during the Green Revolution decades of the 1970s and 80s and becoming world-famous for its Farmer Field Schools in the 1990s, but since then it has gone into decline and is now in a condition widely recognised as a crisis. The reasons are multiple and the current solutions proposed involve a typically neoliberal mixture of privatisation and volunteerisation. This paper, based on field research since the 1990s, maps the national contours of this crisis, explores it in more depth at a local ethnographic level in Bali, and assesses critically the options for future extension services.
Biography:
Dr Graeme Macrae is Senior Lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand. He teaches Anthropology and researches mostly in Bali, sometimes in Java and occasionally in India. His research has been on a wide range of topics, but at present is focused on food and agriculture in Indonesia.