Goverment urged to boost productivity of corn farmers

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Indonesian Feed Miller Association welcomed the government's plan to raise import tariffs on corn products saying such a move would help encourage local farmers to plant more corn.

"We (the association) in principle agree to the plan as long as the government has already come up with an integrated policy for boosting local farmers' productivity," Boediarto Soebijanto, chairman of the association told reporters on Monday.

He said that without measures to boost the productivity of local corn farmers, the new import tariff plan could cause a shortage of the commodity at home, which would eventually hurt the animal feed industry.

Agriculture minister Bungaran Saragih earlier said that the government would soon raise import tariffs on several strategic agricultural products, including corn, rice, sugar and soybeans in a bid to protect local farmers from cheaper imported products.

Indonesia currently sets a zero percent import tariff on both corn and soybeans, while it imposes a 30 percent tariff on rice and tariffs of between 20 percent and 25 percent on sugar.

"We hope the planned import tariffs on corn products will not exceed 10 percent," Boediarto said.

Boediarto also urged the government to use the money collected from the import tariffs for financing the construction of the necessary infrastructure for helping to boost domestic corn production.

He said that Indonesia would import some 1.2 million tons of corn this year to meet a surge in demand from the country's animal feed industries and food producers.

"We are still unable to fulfill domestic demand. We have to import at least one million tons every year, but in the long term we must make efforts to reduce corn imports," he said.

Indonesia imports corn from China, the United States and Brazil. Indonesia imported some 591,056 tons of corn in 1999, 1.4 million tons in 2000 and 1 million tons last year.

Data from the association showed that demand for corn products would continue to increase in the years to come.

It said that the country's animal feed industry was expected to consume some 3.3 million tons of corn this year, up slightly from 2.9 million tons in 2001.

The Central Bureau of Statistics has predicted that the country's corn output will increase by 2.17 percent from 9.35 million tons in 2001 due to the expansion of the area under the crop.

Meanwhile, Bungaran predicted that corn output would reach 12 million tons in 2003, up from this year's target of 11.5 million.