Cooperation vital for agricultural research

JAKARTA (JP): President Soeharto yesterday called on agricultural researchers from around the world to work together to find ways to meet the increasing demand for agricultural and forestry products.

Speaking at the opening of a mid-term meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) yesterday, Soeharto said that increasing agricultural and forestry productivity was becoming imperative and should be pushed forward by technological progress.

"But finding new technologies like these requires time- consuming research, lots of experts and large amounts of money. Thus, in order to make this more efficient and effective, it is important that research centers at the national and international levels cooperate," he told the meeting at the Merdeka Palace here.

Soeharto added that technology transfer was also a crucial aspect since developing countries had limited resources to promote research.

The four-day meeting, hosted by the Ministry of Forestry's Research and Development Agency, will focus on evaluating and assessing CGIAR's programs over the past year.

CGIAR, which involves both the government and private sector, studies ways to increase natural resource productivity, maintain biological diversity and promote technology transfers.

Established in 1970, it oversees 17 research agencies, including the West Java-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the International Center for Research into Agro- forestry.

CIFOR's headquarters in Bogor, West Java, was established in 1992, but was officially opened belatedly by Minister of Forestry Djamaludin Suryohadikusumo on Monday.

CIFOR has research projects in the tropical rain-forests of South America, Asia and Africa. In Indonesia, it conducts research on 300,000 hectares of forest area in the Kayan Mentarang region of East Kalimantan.

Help

For the current (1996/97) fiscal year, the Ministry of Forestry has contributed US$500,000 towards CIFOR's operations: $200,000 is Indonesia's contribution to the agency, while $300,000 is to be used by local researchers and CIFOR scientists for studying research methods.

Soeharto said yesterday that Indonesia had been given lots of help by national and international research centers over the past decades. In the 1970s, he said, Indonesia's rice crops were hit by a plague caused by plant-hoppers, but were rescued by a new plague- resistant variety of rice developed by the Philippines-based IRRI.

"IRRI made a large donation of high-quality rice varieties and agricultural machinery. It also introduced new rice-cultivation technologies, integrated pest management methods and post-harvest technologies," Soeharto said.

"The new seeds and technologies allowed Indonesia to gain self-sufficiency in rice in 1984," he added.

Soeharto affirmed that the agricultural sector would remain an important field of development in spite of the country's fast- growing industrial sector and the government's target of shifting Indonesia's development basis from an agricultural to an industrial one.

"We will still rely on the agricultural sector to provide food for our 200 million-strong population as well as raw material for our developing industries," he said.

He also noted the importance of Indonesia's forests as a source of germ plasma, a water catchment area and as the earth's "lungs".

Indonesia's tropical rainforests are the world's third largest after Brazil and Zaire. (pwn)