Flooding may cost farmers $5 million

BANDUNG: Flooding in the past few days has damaged several thousand hectares of rice fields in several regencies in West Java, which will mean little or no harvests this season in the affected areas, a senior official has said.

Entang Ruchiyat, the chief of Agriculture Office at the West Java provincial administration, said on Friday that, due to the flooding, the estimated harvest failure of over 6,000 hectares would cost farmers approximately Rp 45 billion (approximately US$5 million).

He claimed that 24,000 hectares were saved after the farmers and government officials pumped water out of the rice fields. With the harvest failure, the farmers in the area had lost the opportunity to produce some 30,000 tons of rice, said Entang. -- JP