Government plans tighter control on soybean prices

JAKARTA (JP): The government will tighten control of soybean prices on the domestic market in a bid to encourage farmers to intensify and expand production to reduce dependence on imports, an official says.

"The price controls are necessary to reduce imports because the country's soybean production has increased by an annual average of only 1.1 percent in the last five years, while imports rose 8.5 percent per annum," Director General of Edible Plantation and Horticulture Amrin Kahar said in a seminar here yesterday.

The government currently controls only the price of imported soybeans to protect local farmers from foreign competition.

Amrin said that in 1993, Indonesia produced 1.7 million tons of soybeans and imported 610,600 tons worth US$164.8 million.

"If we want to preserve our exports, we have no other choice than to increase soybean production," he added.

According to Amrin, the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Logistic Agency (Bulog) have agreed to launch a special program to motivate farmers to increase soybean production to achieve national self-sufficiency.

Ten provinces -- East, Central and West Java, Lampung, Aceh, South Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara, North and South Sumatra and Yogyakarta -- will have priority for receiving instruction to help increase production, he said.

During the newly begun Sixth Five Year Development Plan (Repelita VI) period, the country will set aside an additional 184,000 hectares of land for planting soybeans, he added.

Productivity

Amrin said the programs are expected to increase soybean productivity of land devoted to soybean planting from 1.19 tons to 1.5 tons per hectare.

The country's soybean production, therefore, is expected to increase to 2.65 million tons next year, 2.93 million tons in 1996, 3.20 million tons in 1997 and 3.48 million tons in 1998, he said.

In a related development, Dedy Fardiaz, a scholar of the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, supported an increase in soybean production because of their high nutritional value.

Soybeans are already a staple food for most Indonesians. People usually process soybeans to make tofu, tempe, tauco, kecap and soybean milk. Local people use bacterium rhizopus oligosporus to ferment soybeans into tempe. Tauco is fermented soybean paste which is used as a condiment.

Citing research statistics, another speaker, Mansur Fauzan of Bulog, said that during 1987, a single Indonesian on average consumed 8.5 kilograms of soybeans. People living in rural areas consumed 6.6 kilograms each and those in urban areas 12.3 kilograms each.(09)