Food Insecurity Experience Scale Measurement of Agricultural Households in Indonesia: Analysis of the Agricultural Integrated Survey Results

Measuring the food insecurity of agricultural households is very important in the Indonesian context since the country’s agricultural sector is dominated by small-scale farmers that are prone to food insecurity. Moreover, it also describes the resilience and sustainability of the agricultural sector in the country from the social dimension. However, to date, there is no study assessing the prevalence of food insecurity among agricultural households in Indonesia utilizing a nationwide agricultural survey. Hence, to fill the gap, this study aims to gauge the prevalence of food insecurity among agricultural households in Indonesia. In doing so, we applied the Rasch model to the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) data obtained from the results of first Indonesia’s Agricultural Integrated Survey (AGRIS) conducted in 2021. After applying the Rasch Model on FIES data collected from 212,339 agricultural household samples responding to all FIES questions, we found that our FIES data provide a reliable measurement of food insecurity in agricultural households. Following the SDG 2.1.2 framework, the final results showed that the proportion of agricultural households in Indonesia experiencing severe levels of food insecurity was 0.29 per cent while the proportion of agricultural households experiencing moderate or severe levels of food insecurity, combined, was 3.27 per cent of around 20 million agricultural households. As expected, those households experiencing severe food insecurity only manage a small area of agricultural land, particularly on Java Island with an average of fewer than 0.5 hectares per household. This finding may suggest that food insecurity exists in Indonesia among agricultural households with limited access to agricultural land resources.