970,000 tons of imported rice to arrive soon

JAKARTA (JP): At least 970,000 tons of rice imported by the State Logistics Agency (Bulog) will arrive in several ports throughout the country by the end of the year, Minister of Industry and Trade Rahardi Ramelan has said.

Rahardi, who is also Bulog's acting chairman, said that the agency has received the names of the ships that will deliver the rice to the Indonesian ports in November and December.

"With the notification of their readiness to transport the rice, I expect that our rice stock for the upcoming Christmas, New Year, Ramadhan, Idul Fitri and Imlek (the Chinese New Year) festivities, will be more than enough to meet the demand," Rahardi told a press conference on Thursday.

He added that the rice had been procured from several countries under government to government agreements regarding food aid and commercial purchases.

Rahardi said that the government has secured import contracts and aid commitments for 3.15 million tons of rice, or nearly 80 percent of the 4.1 million tons which will be procured by the government from overseas markets during the year, as of October.

The minister, however, did not disclose the total volume of rice which had been shipped to Indonesia this year.

Earlier this year, the government said that it planned to import 4.1 million tons of rice in the 1998/1999 fiscal year, which ended in March, to meet the shortage in supply caused by harvest failures resulting from a prolonged drought.

Rahardi said that Bulog's rice stocks stood at 2.38 million metric tons as of the end of October, enough to meet the domestic demand until the end of this year.

State Minister of Food Affairs and Horticulture A.M. Saefuddin said Bulog's rice stock could reach 3.74 million tons by the end of this year, far above the safe stock target of 2.5 million tons set by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Speaking at the same press conference, Saefuddin said that the government was going to expand its scheme to provide the poor with heavily-subsidized rice in a bid to anticipate the soaring price of rice during the December/January low-harvest period.

"Starting next month the low-priced rice allocated for the poorest families will be raised to 20 kilograms every month per family, and the price will remain Rp 1,000 per kg," he said.

In July, the government launched a program to provide the country's poorest families with 10 kg of medium-quality rice every month for Rp 1,000 per kg. The same grade of rice is sold for Rp 2,500 per kg in the market.

The program, called the special market operation, is designed to cover at least 7.5 million families across the country.

Rahardi said that the government has distributed over 125,000 tons of the subsidized rice to over 10 million of the poorest families as of Nov. 12.

"The program will end in March of next year when the condition of our food production is back to normal," he said. (gis)