Ambitious target set for rice

Ambitious target set for rice

Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Ministry of Agriculture has set an ambitious target of
opening 100,000 hectares of paddy fields per year over the next
eight years to avoid the possibility of rice shortages by the end
of this decade, a senior official at the ministry said.

Achmad Suryana, the head of the Community Empowerment for Food
Security Agency at the ministry, said the paddy expansion program
was necessary if the country was to become self-sufficient in
rice production by the year 2010.

Without such a program, Achmad warned, domestic rice
production can be expected to decline continuously, forcing
Indonesia to import more rice every year and thus become more
dependent on rice imports.

Should that happen, he further cautioned, Indonesia could be
facing a critical situation by the end of this decade, in which
there would not be enough rice available on the international
market to fill the country's demand.

"Expanding the country's rice fields is one of the solutions
proposed by the ministry to avoid such a critical situation," he
said.

"We would focus on opening new fields in the eastern part of
Sumatra, Riau and Kalimantan. For this, we have to cooperate with
related departments, such as the Ministry of Manpower and
Transmigration to provide the labor," Achmad said.

He did not discuss the budget needed for the proposed program,
who would provide the financing and when the program would be
implemented.

According to him, the ministry proposed the program during a
Cabinet meeting, but no decision on it has yet been made.

Rice makes up a major part of the diet for most Indonesians,
with Java as the main producer of the crop.

In 1984, Indonesia achieved rice self-sufficiency, for which
then president Soeharto received an award from the United
Nations' Food Agricultural Organization. Production, however,
since declined and Indonesia imported almost five million tons of
rice in 1999 amid the economic crisis.

Minister of Agriculture Bungaran Saragih voiced similar
concerns about becoming dependent on imported rice during a
seminar on food security on Wednesday in Bogor, West Java.

Bungaran said the country's rice production and population
growth were moving in opposite directions: the former tending to
decline due to the loss of rice fields and a decrease in land
productivity, and the latter tending to grow.

"I admit food security is a time bomb that should be fully
considered. How can we feed a population that grows by three
million per year with our productive land, which is already
limited in size and tends to decrease?

"Everybody is now busy thinking about a 'quick fix' rather
than long-term solutions," said Bungaran.

With a growth of 1.3 percent, or 3 million per year,
Indonesia's population is projected to reach 243 million by 2010.

Economist Bustanul Arifin of the Institute for Economic and
Financial Development, which is also concerned about the
possibility of rice shortages, said that based on a study by the
institute, the country's rice fields were shrinking by one
million hectares per year as they were converted into housing or
factory complexes.

However, the Central Bureau of Statistics said the country's
rice fields had shrunk to some 14 million hectares currently from
16.7 million hectares in 1983. This would mean that the country's
rice fields declined at an annual rate of about 150,000 hectares
over the past 20 years.

Achmad noted that given Indonesia's heavy dependence on rice
imports, other countries could use the commodity as a political
tool to press Indonesia in the future.

"Rice is thus no longer a mere economic matter, which can be
solved with imports, but is also a social and political problem.
If we are too dependent on rice imports, we fear that someday
some countries could launch a rice embargo against Indonesia to
push their political goals," he said.

Bustanul agreed with Achmad, saying imports were not an
appropriate solution to Indonesia's rice problem.

"We produce 48 tons of unhusked rice, equal to 30 tons of rice
per year. Our demand is about 30 tons, which means that to secure
supplies, we have to import about two million tons.

"Meanwhile, the total rice volume traded on the international
market is very small, about 11 to 13 tons. This could be a
problem in the future if we depend too much on imports for our
rice supplies," he said.

Separately, Pantjar Simatupang from the Center for Social and
Economic Research, agreed that Indonesia needed to open new rice
fields every year to avoid rice shortages in the future.

He noted, however, that the field expansion program should be
coupled with a program aimed at increasing the productivity of
existing rice fields.

"There are two things we have to do: expand the rice fields
and enhance the existing fields' productivity by, among other
things, using appropriate technology," he said.