RI gearing up for record rice imports

RI gearing up for record rice imports

CANBERRA (Reuters): Widespread rice crop failure in Indonesia because of El Nino-induced drought would stretch the country's distribution system to handle record imports, an Australian academic said on Friday.

This year, Indonesia was committed to import the greatest amount of rice in any single year since independence, Jim Fox of the Australian National University's (ANU) Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies told an ANU conference on El Nino.

Fox has just returned from Indonesia where he conducted a study for the World Bank on the effects of the El Nino-induced drought on crop production.

Fox would not disclose his assesment of how far Indonesia's rice production will fall but said a report would be made public soon.

But he left no doubt that the crop will be savaged by the drought. "Ports will be flooded with rice," he said.

The question existed of whether the ports could handle all of the rice which would be coming into Indonesia, he said.

But the main problem would be distribution, he said.

The big question was how much of the total harvest of rice would be lost and how much might be regained in a catch-up with subsequent plantings, he said.

Production would show a steep drop all over Java from the next crop and the second crop this year would produce some of the rice which should have come out of the first crop, he said.

He also said east Indonesia, especially the Nusa Tenggara chain of islands, would produce virtually no corn this year in coastal regions while the crop in higher areas would be down by about 30-40 percent, he said.

He said this left areas of Indonesia worse off than Papua New Guinea, where rains since December held out the hope of ameliorating a desperate situation caused by crop devastation.

The situation in Indonesia's eastern islands could only get worse, Fox said.

Both Fox and speakers on drought in Papua New Guinea described the 1997/98 El Nino as either the worst or the second worst this century -- but probably the worst.

Chris Ballard, also of the ANU Research School, said that in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya heavy rain since December had begun to restore food supplies to previously badly hit areas, but other areas may still take months to recover.

Malaria had spread to many areas of the region because of the drought, he said.