Agrintara suffers shortage of CPO

JAKARTA (JP): State cooking oil producer PT Perkebunan Agrintara said on Tuesday that it had operated below its production capacity for at least four months due to a shortage of crude palm oil (CPO).

Company plant manager Onward Siahaan complained that the company had only received 7,000 metric tons of CPO per month from the State Palm Oil Marketing Center (PPS) since August, far below its processing capacity of 25,000 tons per month.

"The supply was even lower than 7,000 tons in November and December. It has resulted in higher production costs and caused us a great loss," Siahaan said.

Company director Fathan Kamil blamed the scarcity on the dubious and untransparent practices in the selling of CPO produced by state plantation firms PT Perkebunan Nusantara I through XIV.

Fathan said that State Palm Oil Marketing Center officials preferred to sell their CPO to private processors.

"The scarcity of CPO supply should not happen because the country currently has an abundant supply of CPO. As of the middle of November, PTPN's CPO stock was 200,000 tons," he said.

Another Agrintara executive who asked for anonymity said that several private processors were now being given easier access to buy CPO from the marketing center.

"It's not fair because we pay the same prices for the CPO produced by PTPN. So there is no reason for PPS to neglect us, a state cooking oil producer and PTPN subsidiary," he said.

Onward said the supply scarcity had hampered the company's program to raise exports.

"Eighty percent of our production is initially allocated for export while the remaining 20 percent is for domestic supply. But due to the scarcity of CPO, most of our production is sold on the domestic market," he said.

Perkebunan Agrintara, which is based on Batam island in Riau province, is owned jointly by all the state plantation firms. The company is one the country's three state cooking oil producers.

The other state cooking oil producers are PTPN II, which has a processing capacity of 5,200 tons per month, and PTPN IV, which has a processing capacity of 14,000 tons per month.

PTPN currently produces about 1.9 million tons of CPO every year, approximately 30 percent of the country's total production.

Cooking oil producers buy CPO from plantation companies before processing it into olein. One hundred kilograms of CPO can be processed into 70 kg of olein. (gis)