Using GIS for Integrated Assessment of Agriculture Land Suitability and Food Security in Small Islands

Abstract

Food security has recently become one of important issues in Indonesia’s small islands, since increasing human populations and declining land quality have continued to occur in such areas. With limited new agricultural land in small islands to develop, meeting the food needs of future populations in such areas will require an increase of crop yields, through appropriate decisions on land use and land management. The principal aim of this paper is to construct a spatial decision making mechanism using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to perform land suitability analysis and to assess food security in a very limited agricultural land of a small island. We were use spatially integrated method in GIS and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to generate priority of food crop development that may give insights into some important criteria of food security. In our analysis, we use five types of food crops (dryland rice, maize, sweet potato, taro plant, and cassava), with five generic criteria: land potential (LAND), economic aspect (ECON), culture aspect (CULT), infrastructure availability (INFR), and local government policy (POLY). Our preliminary findings show that maize was the most important food crop to be developed in this area, followed by cassava, dryland rice, sweet potato, and taro plant, although each criterion selected gives a different rank for the five crop types. The results of this analysis could provide the basis for local government to strengthen its decision making in the allocation of food crops from the perspectives of the small island’s food security.