The Green Revolution in Indonesia: A Replicable Success?

This chapter aims to disentangle the causal complex underpinning Indonesia’s ‘green revolution’ in order to assess which aspects of it are, in principle, replicable in other parts of the world and which aspects are not. More in particular this study focuses on the question which elements of the transition in Javanese rice farming are useful for Sub-Saharan African economies, where comparable transitions in crop productivity have not occurred (yet). The main argument is that specific historical and ecological conditions make it unlikely that Indonesia’s green revolution will be replicated in (parts of) Africa, but that Indonesian agricultural policies contain some important lessons for African governments that aspire to promote broad-based rural development.