Java farmers expected to begin sowing soon

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Rice farmers in Java, who have been forced to delay planting crops for more than two months due to the long drought, may be able to start planting next month, when rains are expected to fall again, an official said Thursday.

Ato Suprapto, director general of agricultural facilities at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the ministry had been informed about the start of the rains for Java in November during a recent meeting with the Geophysics and Meteorology Agency (BMG), the National Atomic Agency (Batan) and the National Aviation and Space Agency (Lapan).

Farmers usually plant their crops in October and harvest them in December in the last planting season of the year.

While farmers in Java, the country's main rice producer, are still waiting for the rains to come, farmers in Sumatra and Kalimantan have already started planting their crops because the rainy season had arrived in those places, Ato was quoted by Antara as saying.

Ato's statement came in the wake of the report by the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA), which warned that droughts would continue in some areas of Indonesia for several more months.

This, the agency stated, could force Indonesia to import more rice than the initial target for this year.

Local papers reported that imported rice had started flooding the market over the past several weeks.

However, despite the flurry of reports about the influx of rice imports, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) recently made an optimistic projection that the national unhusked rice output would rise 2.27 percent this year to 51.6 million tons. This is equal to about 30 million tons of edible rice.

In 1984, Indonesia achieved rice self-sufficiency, for which then President Soeharto received an award from the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization. Production, however, has since declined and Indonesia imported almost five million tons of rice in 1999 during the economic crisis.

Last year, Indonesia imported 1.5 million tons of rice, according to the BPS.

Indonesia imports rice from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and China.