Participation and social solidarity of farmers in supporting corn exports in Gorontalo regency

The implementation of the regional autonomy system is clear evidence of such changes. Regional autonomy has brought about changes to the system of government in Indonesia from centralistic to desentralistic. The change of the government system also brought a share of development in the area including in Gorontalo Regency. One of the changes that occur is the help of corn seeds. Through this assistance, corn production from Gorontalo corn farmers proved to increase sharply from 692 thousand tons in 2016, to 1.5 million tons in 2018. Even from the total corn exports of 380 thousand tons in 2018, 113 thousand tons were produced by Gorontalo farmers. This research uses a type of qualitative research. This research aims to describe various conditions and situations of social reality that exist in society as objects of research and raise these realities to the surface as characteristics, characters, traits, models, signs, or images of conditions, situations or phenomena of solidarity and social capital of farmers. The social participation of farmers is realized from the formation of farmer groups that can be said to be part of the signification structure of farmers who are always coordinated with group members and the government so that there is an intense increase in corn exports, which indicates the government's concerns in a broader form to farmers but in the name of laws and regulations. The social solidarity of corn farmers manifested in the culture of participation of farmers in increasing corn commodity exports takes place by means of full involvement in all agropolitan program activities. The involvement has reciprocal elements or back-to-backs for farmers in the form of good crops and has an impact on their level of economic well-being.