Sulawesi has been the theatre of a spectacular cocoa boom, which started from scratch in the late 1970s, with production exceeding the 200,000-tonne threshold in the mid-1990s. Sulawesi also used to be a rice granary for Indonesia. Although it still exports rice to other provinces, Sulawesi turned its dynamism towards cocoa. They mostly are Bugis farmers. Then Balinese and Javanese transmigrants started to follow. From that historical development in Sulawesi, the objective is to analyze at the microeconomic level, how Indonesia switched back from rice self-sufficiency to structural dependency on imports since 1994. Bugis used their experience and capital built on rice to start cocoa pioneer lives that proved to be highly successful. They also benefited of involuntary helpful policies such as fertilizer subsidies that were conceived for rice self-sufficiency, not for cocoa. Within official projects, Balinese and Javanese transmigrants were often obliged not to plant tree crops, or at least not beyond the 0.25ha backyard. How did these policies involuntarily trigger new impetus to cocoa and eventually hamper the development of paddy cultivation in the 1990s? The Sulawesi cocoa story may be a showcase for understanding why the gap between the national demand and supply of rice increased since the mid-1990s.