Organic Rice Standard: Transition Toward Sustainable Organic Food System

Summary

Strategic research is important to understand drivers of sustainable organic food from production to consumption and link this to real world example. In this research we elaborate the organic rice standard in Indonesia. The research is attempted to identify the current condition of organic rice standard in Indonesia and finding the gap that could possible to enhance the sustainable approach. Is the organic rice standard suitable for supporting sustainable organic food system or not? We conduct three-year research starting from cultivation, processing and consumption of organic rice in Indonesia. We found that (1) Cultivation organic rice is fitting the sustainable approach in term of less residue of pesticide, better farmer incomes as well as protecting biodiversity (2) Organic rice processing following the conventional milling standard and resulted the decreasing of nutritional ingredient (3) Consumer perception on organic rice is highly on the healthiness attribute which cannot be easily proven as long as the milling approach using conventional standard. From this study we conclude that the gap of research in processing and consumption of organic rice should be in the priority, i.e. what is the standard of milling in organic rice? Or what is the perception of consumer on organic brown rice in Indonesia. Based on this, we could develop the organic food system start from an example of organic rice.