In the mid-1990s a joint research project was established between CASER (Bogor), CIES (Adelaide), CSIS (Jakarta) and RSPAS (at ANU, Canberra) to examine interactions between agriculture, trade and the environment in Indonesia. Funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR Project No. 9449), the specific objective of the project was to assess the production, consumption, trade, income distributional, regional, environmental, and welfare effects in Indonesia of structural and policy changes at home and abroad. Particular attention was to be paid to those structural and policy changes that could affect Indonesia's agricultural sector over the next 5-10 years. The implications of national and global economic growth, of regional and multilateral trade liberalisation initiatives, and of Indonesia's ongoing unilateral policy reforms were the initial focus of the study. However, with the onslaught of the financial crisis that began in the latter part of 1997, the project leaders added that issue to the research agenda.

The analysis draws on and adapts the global GTAP Model, which is a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for the world economy within which there are sub-models for numerous individual economies including for Indonesia. The project began by also using a national CGE model for Indonesia, called INDOGEM, which was constructed in a previous ACIAR project by Ray Trewin and colleagues at the Australian National University (which in turn drew on a forestry-focused model developed by Philippa Dee of the Productivity Commission in Canberra).