Local Wisdom and Food Resilience in Selaru Island Community of Maluku Province

Abstract

Human works overtimes to fulfill their need for food in any sorts of ways. Selaru Island community has performed what so called Tnyafar for long ago. The Tnyafar is an expression of local wisdom in meeting food necessity. Research is aimed to analyze the relationship between local wisdom and household food resilience within the Tnyafar context in Selaru Island. Research uses a qualitative approach with two strategies, deep interview, and Focused Group Discussion. Informants are selected with a snowball technique involving guidance from Land-Lord as key informant. The selected informants include chief and former chief of Tnyafar, village chief, and Tnyafar member, either men or women. The result of research indicates that every household, through Tnyafar, could meet food necessity and other needs from environment nature. Important values inherited as local wisdom from this activity are that rules have been made on how to meet the necessities through planting certain commodities and that strategy have been set to utilize marine resources in a sustainable way. The implementation of Sasi, the utilization of commodity during food crisis, and the strategy of food processing, are efforts to sustain food availability in the longer term.