Jakarta, June 20 -- Seven days into 2026, President Prabowo Subianto announced that Indonesia had officially entered a new era of food security, signaling its self-reliance to the world.

That day, farmland in Kertamukti Village, Karawang, West Java, bore witness to his declaration that Indonesia had regained food self-sufficiency before millions attending a bumper rice harvest festival both in person and online.

Records from the Ministry of Agriculture show that Indonesia's food self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) ranged between 91.04 and 98.88 percent during 2020-2023 before slipping to 87.14 percent in 2024. Any figure below 100 percent means the country has not achieved self-sufficiency.

The following year, however, the ratio surged to 110...