Indonesia needs to expand range of export products
Indonesia needs to expand range of export products
JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia needs to expand its range of non-oil products which are promoted for export in a bid to boost its revenues from international trade, a senior trade official said yesterday.
"There are other products whose exports are growing rapidly. Some of them even grow more than 100 percent per annum but only a few people pay attention to them," the head of the Ministry of Trade's research and development agency, Paian Nainggolan, told reporters.
The government thus far promotes the growth of the country's exports of palm oil, electronics, leather goods, food, rubber products, wood products, textiles, jewelry, pulp and paper, and metals.
After addressing a seminar on formulating competitiveness of Indonesian products, Paian said that the trade ministry has classified export products into three groups to draw people's attention to goods with potential growth.
Yesterday's seminar was organized by daily Bisnis Indonesia and the Asian Institute of Management.
Paian explained that the first group comprises the 10 priority products -- the total export value of which accounts for about 45 percent of the country's total export revenues --, while the other two groups represent products highly dependent on natural resources and high technology.
He did not specifically name the products of the last two groups.
According to Paian, some of Indonesia's manufactured goods have been actually very competitive on the world market.
Between 1981 to 1994, Indonesia's total exports of manufactured goods increased from merely US$1 billion to $22.4 billion, or an average of 27 percent per year.
The improvement resulted from Indonesia's programs of industrialization since the 1970s and was accelerated by deregulatory packages introduced since 1983. "This is encouraging and has made Indonesia confident in facing the implementation of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) agreement," he noted.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), under its AFTA agreement, has been committed to liberalizing its trade by 2003.
Paian said that the Ministry of Trade will regularly issue a market directory to show businessmen the latest developments of each export product on foreign markets.
"The market directory will be made in such a way to push producers to improve their efficiency on the markets," he said, adding that only efficient producers will benefit from AFTA, while those that are inefficient will be hurt.
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, Indonesia's exports of textiles and textile products during the first seven months of this year increased by 1.4 percent to US$3.3 billion from the same period of last year, while exports of pulp and paper rose by 116.5 percent to $705 million, leather goods by 11.5 percent to $1.3 billion, rubber products by 91 percent to $1.3 billion, electronics by 27 percent to $1.3 billion and steel products by 28 percent to $900 million.
Exports of palm oil rose 20.9 percent to $833.6 million and metals 52 percent to $336 million. However, exports of wood products fell by 6.26 percent to $3.1 billion and food and beverages by 8.7 percent to $363 million. (13)