Improving Indonesia’s Food Statistics through the Area Sampling Frame Method

One of the sources of policy bias against food commodities in Indonesia, particularly rice and secondary crops, is the low level of data accuracy. This situation has led to a surge in policy costs, both in economic and political terms. A paradigmatic example is the implementation of rice import policies that oftentimes provoke widespread public debate, when at the time official data show a relatively large surplus in national production. In 2018, for instance, despite national rice production surplus surpassing 10 million tons, the realized rice import figures reached 2.25 million tons. This paper specifically addresses a number of issues related to the process of collecting agricultural data on food crops in Indonesia. The analysis focuses on technical account of food crop data collection, the problem of overestimation based on several studies conducted by Statistics Indonesia (BPS), the application of the Area Sampling Frame (ASF) method to revise overestimated data on harvested rice areas, some notes on the ASF application, and closes with several notes and policy recommendations regarding the availability of agricultural data in Indonesia, particularly food crops