NL supports Indonesian Youth’s Action with Circular Agri-food
This year the Agriculture Department of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Jakarta (JAK-LNV) is committed to raise awareness of Indonesian agriculture and food stakeholders of the Netherlands Circular Agrifood (CA). Together with the International Association of Students in Agricultural and Related Sciences (IAAS) Indonesia, JAK-LNV is organizing Youth Agrinity festival (YAF) that takes place from 16 October 2021 – 05 December 2021. Youth Agrinity (Agriculture Sustainability) Festival is a series of celebrations for Indonesian youths in the topic of Agriculture, Food, Circularity, and Sustainability. The series of events consist of webinar, talk show, and competitions targeting 400+ national participants. YAF aims to support Indonesia’s and the Netherlands’ achievement of the SDGs for “2: Zero hunger”, “12: Responsible consumptions and production”, and “13: Climate action”.
The Kick-Off was held on Saturday, 16 October 2021 in conjunction with the 2021 World Food Day. It was attended by 130 participants, students of Universities all around Indonesia. In this event, we were honored by contribution of 3 main speakers, namely Prof. Dr. Arif Satria, SP, MSi - Rector of Agriculture university of IPB, who is founder of IAAS Indonesia; HE Lambert Grijns, the Ambassador of the kingdom of the Netherlands to Indonesia; and also dr. Saskia Visser, Head of the Circular and Climate Neutral Society Program at Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands.
At this event, the Youth’s competition that consists of essay, infographic, and on farm video contests was officially begun.
Circular Agriculture is an agricultural system that uses resources in a circular manner on the same land for production processes and is integrated with livestock and energy, so there is no such thing called waste. While everywhere in the world, countries have problems and challenges in the agricultural sector, we need to preserve the environment for the life of the future generation; and we need to produce healthy nutritious food through sustainable agriculture practices that must respect the value of organic waste as agriculture inputs that are nutritious to the soil.
Circular Agriculture, Indonesian way
In Indonesia, where agriculture has been growing as old as the age of the nation, this Circular Agriculture is on a par with Closed Loop Agriculture (CLA). CLA is traditional practices of Indonesian farmers; however it may be not schematized. The term remains especially unfamiliar to the youth and young farmers generation. It is about time to demonstrate a number of options in agriculture practices, approaches, methodologies; as youth and particularly young farmers we must be able to adopt the good in order to improve to be best invention in Indonesian ways. We dare to take the challenge to learn the Dutch concept of Circular Agriculture; and we shall see if this approach would best be blended into some traditional Indonesian agriculture approach that we usually call it as “Local Wisdom”. Let’s learn a new approach! Let’s invent in Circular Agriculture!!!
Kick-off video is available in this link : Youth Agrinity festival
Find us:
Read more about IAAS : https://iaas.or.id/
Read more about World Food Day 2021: https://www.fao.org/world-food-day/en