BABAK BARU PENYULUHAN PERTANIAN DAN PEDESAAN (NEW ERA OF AGRICULTURAL AND RURAL EXTENSION)

Abstract

Many parties have believed that agricultural and rural sector have been shifting toward diversification, commercialization, sustainability and efficiency. Those phenomenons have made it necessary for the paradigm changes of agricultural extension practices. From the perspective of political-economy, many dramatically changes have occurred including decentralization, democratization, liberalization and privatization. To respond to the new paradigm, countries worldwide have adopted a variety of institutional reform for agricultural and rural extension.

In Indonesian case, by considering a big variation of farming conditions and farmer resources, choosing only single strategy for institutional reform of agricultural extension has been likely not appropriate. Funding and dervice of public extension are still hugely needed especially for food production and smallholder farming business. However, privatization of extension has been started from last decade for profitable farming commodities. Public-private-partnership is likely one among the solutions. for agricultural extension arrangements.

Optimizing of accumulation and distribution of agricultural knowledge's that has been acknowledged as triangle knowledge model including research, education and extension where farmer is situated as a center of the system will be great solutions for overcoming various problems of agricultural development. From technical perspective, development and utilization of Informationd and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for agricultural extension has become promizing strategy. ICTs in some cases could guaranty high speed and effectiveness of information distribution for new technologies and innovations.

Keywords: agricultural, extension, new, era, change