Drought won't harm rice supply, but will hurt farmers' income

Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The current drought will not create a rice supply problem at home, but could potentially send millions of farmers into poverty, experts said.

"There will be no supply problem ... Indonesia can always import more rice," Bayu Krisnamurthi, director of the Center of Development Studies at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

But he said the drought could badly affect the lives of farmers.

Bayu could not yet estimate the decrease in production because of the harsh dry season, nor the impact on farmers' income, but based on press reports saying that around 300,000 hectares (ha) of rice fields had so far been affected, some 1.2 million families could fall into poverty.

His calculation is based on statistics that Indonesian farmers own an average of 0.25 ha of paddy field. Each hectare can produce between 4 tons and 4.5 tons of rice a year.

As the current dry season may extend for a longer period, more fields could be affected, which means more farmers will surely suffer.

The Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG) forecasted that the dry season would extend until November.

Separately, Pantjar Simatupang, the head of the Center for Agro Social and Economic Research in Bogor, also downplayed the risk of a rice supply problem.

He said that even during the droughts of the mid-1970s and late 1990s, the country did not suffer a rice scarcity problem.

"The world is rich with food sources (that can be imported)," he said.

"Even in the 1970s, when other rice producing countries also suffered drought, we still had enough rice," he said.

He also said that the drought would affect farmers and may lead some of them into starvation if the government did not take necessary measures.

"I've read in the news that some people, particularly in remote and poor villages have already been forced to eat only once a day or even to are eating anything that is remotely edible."

The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) reported that Indonesia's unhusked rice production reached 51.37 million tons in 2002, while the average national consumption of rice was estimated to reach 28.03 million tons per year. It is estimated that every 3.16 million tons of unhusked rice equal to 2 million tons of rice, which meant a slight surplus.

A report from The Rice Trader, however, showed that in 2002 Indonesia imported 3.70 million tons of rice.

To help minimize the impact of drought on farmers' lives in the future, Bayu said the government had to change its policies on water resource management, criticizing it for a lack of effort in protecting water catchment areas.

"The poor management makes the country experience extreme situations such as floods in the rainy season and droughts in the dry season," he said.

"These droughts and floods will be repeated every year if the fundamental problem -- poor water management -- is not improved," he said.

Separately, the Indonesian Farmers Association (HKTI) called on Wednesday for the government to quickly take action to stop rice importation, as the country's unhusked rice output would be adequate to meet domestic demand this year despite the dry season.

HKTI chairman Siswono Yudhohusodo predicted that the country's unhusked rice output would reach 53 million tons this year, or the equivalent of 32 million tons of rice.

"This (output) is enough to meet domestic demand of about 29.1 million tons this year," he said.