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.