Govt to use new agricultural land this year

Sari P. Setiogi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government is planning to open up some 304,451 hectares of new agricultural land this year in a bid to increase the production of food crops like rice, corn and soybeans, said a senior official.

"We expect to produce more food this year. Particularly with rice, we are expecting to produce 53 to 54 million tons of the unhusked variety, which is the equivalent of about 35 million tons of rice," said Sutarto Alimuso, director of food plant conservation at the Ministry of Agriculture.

He said that most of the new agricultural land was located outside Java.

Opening up new productive land is part of a government attempt to increase domestic food supplies to reduce dependency on imported foods. Rice, for instance, is considered to be a strategic commodity as it is the staple food of most of the country's more than 210 million population.

Sutarto said that the ministry would adopt various measures to meet the above target. These included the utilization of former transmigration sites long abandoned by farmers and of former paddy fields.

He explained that with a little treatment and use of fertilizers the above types of land could be put to productive agricultural use.

"... We are going to utilize about 17,000 hectares of this kind of land," said Sutarto.

But he could not specify the amount of investment needed for the program.

He added that the ministry would push farmers to plant horticultural crops in their paddy fields to allow them to have a better harvest.

Meanwhile, commenting on the possibility of flooding and climate change expected to take place in the early months of the year, he said that the government had prepared some 350,000 hectares of land to replace the function of lowland areas that might be badly affected by the floods.

"They are located in seven provinces, including Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra, South Kalimantan and West Kalimantan," said Sutarto.

He also mentioned that some irrigation facilities had also been repaired and some new ones built.

"With all these preparations, we expect that climate change or flooding will not (seriously) affect farmers' crops this year."