From Hormuz to Home Gardens: What Women Farmers Teach Us About Food System Resilience

In a village in Indragiri Hilir, a regency in Riau, a community of female farmers is tending small plots between rows of coconut trees. There, water spinach grows next to chili plants, cucumbers climb along simple trellises, and rhizomes fill the shaded corners. The arrangement is not accidental. Rather, these women are making deliberate choices about what grows where, how soil is fed, and which crops support each other through the season.

This is intercropping, locally known as tumpangsari, a practice that places multiple crops on the same land in ways that are mutually reinforcing. It produces food for households, generates income from surplus sold at the village market, and keeps the soil's nutrient cycle functioning without heavy dependence on external inputs. What looks like a modest garden is, in agricultural terms, a managed system. In this case, the people managing it are commonly women.

At first glance, this looks like a local practice shaped by necessity and tradition. But thousands of kilometers away, the conditions that underpin modern agriculture are under strain. The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most critical shipping corridors, is currently facing disruption amidst recent escalation between the United States-Israel and Iran. What happens in that narrow strait may appear distant from a coconut plantation in Riau. The connection, however, runs deeper than it appears.

The strait is widely known for oil and gas shipments. Less visible is its role in the global fertilizer supply chain. Through this corridor moves a significant share of the raw materials that modern agriculture depends on: urea, phosphate, and sulfur, along with the gas that fuels fertilizer production itself. These inputs rarely appear on a consumer's radar, yet they sit quietly behind every planting season, in every country that grows food at scale.

Indonesia’s fertilizer system remains connected to this global network. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) in 2024, Indonesia is the 11th largest fertilizer importer in the world. This pattern continued into 2025. Even though Indonesia is the largest urea producer in Southeast Asia, imports still occur to ensure supply reaches the country’s most remote islands.

Other fertilizer materials are more structurally dependent on imports, mainly for NPK materials such as Phosphate (P) and Kalium (K), as they are not naturally available in Indonesia. Although kalium imports are claimed to be sourced from Canada and Laos which are located outside the conflicted region, Jordan and Algeria are the largest sources of Indonesia's phosphate imports, with 60 percent of the total phosphate supply is from Jordan alone. On the other hand, sulfur is sourced from the Gulf region. Gas fuel, essential for fertilizer production, including urea production, also travels through global energy markets. With disruptions along key shipping corridors, these flows face real risk. For Indonesia's food system, the implications are not immediate but they can be significant.

The Ministry of Agriculture has reassured the public that Indonesia’s fertilizer stock is currently safe. That statement reflects the current buffer stock situation and should be acknowledged as such. However, buffer stocks only address today's supply. They do not resolve structurally what happens if disruptions persist across multiple seasons and fertilizer prices keep mounting.

Urea supply may remain relatively stable because domestic production capacity is strong. However, the situation is different for compound fertilizers such as NPK. These fertilizers rely heavily on imported phosphate and sulfur, the same materials that move through the initial vulnerable shipping corridors.

NPK fertilizers are also the most widely used by smallholder farmers. These farmers have the least buffer to absorb price increases and the least access to alternative inputs. When fertilizer prices rise or supplies tighten, the impact reaches them first. Women farmers, who make up a significant share of smallholder agriculture in Indonesia, are disproportionately in this position. They tend to operate smaller plots, have less access to credit, and are less likely to be reached by subsidy distribution systems.

Fertilizer shocks also behave differently from other commodity shocks. Unlike oil price increases that are immediately visible at the fuel pump, fertilizer disruptions appear with delay. The impact usually arrives one full planting cycle later. Farmers may only feel shortages during the next planting season, while harvest delays and reduced yields follow months afterward. By the time food prices rise at the market, the window to intervene has often already closed.

This vulnerability pattern has appeared before. The Red Sea conflict in 2024 already tested the system. PT Pupuk Indonesia's raw material imports were delayed, adding 30 percent to costs and up to 14 additional days of shipping time, at a point where rice yield enhancement was urgently needed due to weather disruptions. The Russia-Ukraine crisis in 2022 struck similarly, as Russia was a major urea exporter and wheat supplier.

Regenerative Agriculture as a Pathway

One pathway to reduce dependency on imported inputs is through regenerative agriculture practice. This approach strengthens natural nutrient cycles within farms and reduces reliance on external fertilizers. It does not eliminate fertilizer use entirely, but it can meaningfully reduce the need for large volumes of external inputs by improving soil health, integrating organic nutrient sources through diversification, and creating natural barriers against pests and diseases. Those processes would serve its efficacy when done through practices like keeping the soil undisturbed, retaining crop residues on the soil to add organic matter which serves as ‘food’ for beneficial microorganisms that in turn add nutrients back to the crops, and growing diverse crops that gain nutrient from different soil depth at once.

Reducing dependency, even partially, shortens the food production value chain. When fewer inputs must travel across continents, global disruptions carry less weight within domestic agriculture.

In many parts of Indonesia, these practices are not new ideas. They already exist within local farming communities, especially at the smallholder scale. And in many of those communities, women are the ones keeping them alive.

According to the World Bank, women make up about 24 percent of smallholder farmers in Indonesia, while around 10 percent of agricultural households are headed by women. However, the Food and Agriculture Organization has long noted that subsistence and household level production are often undercounted in official surveys. The real share of women's agricultural contribution is likely higher than formal statistics suggest.

Kitchen or home gardening, or often called as pekarangan, is one example of where this contribution is most visible. These small food plots around homes rarely appear in agricultural statistics, yet they produce vegetables, herbs, and other crops that support household food security. They also represent one of the simplest and most accessible forms of regenerative agriculture. Multiple crops grow together in the same space, soil nutrients are replenished through organic waste and natural cycles, and external inputs are kept to a minimum.

This is not a distant concept. In Indragiri Hilir, Riau, women farmers are actively managing these systems. During our field work conducted in 2025, female farmers were observed practicing tumpangsari across their plots, and women farmer communities were managing home gardens between their family coconut plantations. These are not isolated cases. They are examples of practices that already exist at the community level, sustained largely by women, and largely uncounted. Indeed, not all smallholder farmers practice agriculture this way. But the elements are present and the knowledge is there.

A Reflection Back

The women farming in Indragiri Hilir are not responding to a global fertilizer crisis. Their practices were not designed around international shipping routes or geopolitical tensions. They simply grow food in ways that keep their land productive and their households supplied.

Yet in a moment when global supply chains are under strain, these local practices begin to look less like tradition and more like quiet resilience.

The solution to fertilizer dependency is not going to arrive on a cargo ship alone. In many places, parts of the answer are already present within communities. They are growing in home gardens and between rows of coconut trees. They are held in the knowledge of women who have been farming this way for generations.

What these women and their practices need is not just recognition. The policies that shape their farming lives should be built in consideration of their realities. They need greater access to the public services and market linkages that have historically bypassed smallholder women farmers. At the same time, the regenerative practices they carry need to be treated not only as tradition to be documented, but also as knowledge to be built upon.

Strengthening food system resilience may begin not only with distant supply routes, but also with the people who are already growing food differently on the ground. Most especially, recognizing the overlooked practice done by smallholders female farmers.

To know more about regenerative agriculture practices done at the community level of Indonesia, you can read our previous article here. Ultimately, for a deeper dive on TJF’s past analysis related to food crisis resilience, you check these research briefs:

What Could be the Strategy to Strengthen our Food System?

Strengthening Farmers Resilience and Rural Food System in Response to the Pandemic

Re-visiting Government of Indonesia Strategies on Food Crisis and Farmers’ Resilience

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