Breadth Without Balance: Five Crops and One That Matters in Indonesian Provincial Plantations
Keywords:
crop diversification, specialisation, Herfindahl-Hirschman index, plantation crops, provincial economyAbstract
The typical Indonesian province grows five of the country's seven plantation crops, which sounds diversified, and takes 77.18 per cent of its plantation tonnage from one of them, which is not. Using Central Statistics Agency figures for 2024 across thirty-eight provinces and seven crops, this article computes for each producing province a Herfindahl-Hirschman index over its own crop mix. The mean is 0.6774 and the median 0.7369; twenty-one of the thirty-seven producing provinces take at least 80 per cent of their output from a single crop and thirty-two take at least half. The number of crops a province grows explains very little of this: the correlation between crop count and the index is only minus 0.3194. Kalimantan Utara is the clearest case, growing five of the seven crops and obtaining 99.72 per cent of its tonnage from oil palm. At the other end Jawa Barat, with an index of 0.2027, grows all seven and takes 27.66 per cent from its largest. Oil palm is dominant in twenty-two of the thirty-seven provinces and coconut in ten. A count of crops grown is not a measure of diversification, and the two must be reported together.References
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