Rapid urbanization has aggravated challenges in sustaining the peri-urban rice farming sector. Challenges arising from rapid urbanization threaten rice farmers in peri-urban areas because of increasing economic and land pressures. This has caused significant marginalization among rice farmers. In Indonesia, despite contributing 13.28% of the national gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021, the agricultural sector is dominated by marginal farmers who struggle with poverty and lack land ownership. This study aims to identify different pathways for the marginalization of rice farmers by integrating spatiotemporal land use and land cover (LULC) change analysis, landscape fragmentation metrics, and systems thinking (ST) through causal loop diagrams (CLDs). Furthermore, an attempt to reconceptualize the term marginal rice farmers is made by considering the total number of cultivated rice fields and broader factors that contribute to the feedback loop of marginalization. This study shows that rice farmer marginalization in peri-urban areas is caused by small land size or poverty, and the interactions between ecosystem service degradation, productivity decline, economic pressure, and land conversion differ across landscape configurations. Moreover, this study enhances the understanding of peri-urban agricultural transformation and provides landscape-sensitive policy insights to support inclusive and resilient agricultural systems by reconceptualizing the marginalization of rice farmers as a dynamic socio-spatial process.
Ameridyani et al. (Wed,) studied this question.