Assessing Rice Production Sustainability under Future Landuse and Population in Deli Serdang Regency, Indonesia

Rice is the staple food and its cultivation requires a specific land condition. The population growth, urbanization, and plantation expansion together with socio-economic development are the driving factors of the riceland decline in Deli Serdang Regency of North Sumatera, Indonesia. As a consequence, likely availability and sustainability of rice production are threatened. Hence, it is important to understand how the future landuse and population change will affect the riceland area and production. In the lack of spatially simulated information for the future which could be useful in planning the riceland areas, the study objectives were to project the landuse change by 2040 under three scenarios, Business as Usual (BAU), Potential Riceland Protection (PRP) and Conservation Oriented (CO), and to investigate the impact of consumption demand on the sustainability of rice production. Landsat satellite data of 2009 and 2018, several spatial GIS data, and survey data were analyzed in ArcGIS, Dyna-CLUE, and SPSS software to generate the landuse classification and to simulate the future landuses; while the population projection by 2040 was derived from a Geometric Model. The results showed that forest and riceland areas will decrease with the continuous increase of plantation and urban areas under BAU scenario, but could be protected and increased under PRP scenario. The sustainability of rice production depends not only on the total riceland area, but also the productivity, the population growth, the consumption rate, and the policy. The simulated results of three scenarios serve as an important input to planning for protecting the riceland areas and thus sustained rice production in Deli Serdang Regency.