Rice aid allegedly sold to flour mill

JAKARTA (JP): An official of a non-governmental organization (NGO) accused the City Logistics Agency (Dolog Jaya) of illegally selling rice donated by the World Food Program (WFP) to a flour factory and not properly allocating it to the needy.

Farid R. Faqih, coordinator of the Pangan for the Poor (Param) NGO, said on Tuesday he had received very low quality rice from Dolog Jaya for the past eight months, while normally the quality of rice provided by the WFP was good.

He said he suspected that some Dolog officials had profited personally by changing the rice, selling the good quality rice at market prices and distributing the low quality stock from Dolog to the poor.

WFP, which has sponsored the rice distribution program since April 1999 and has cooperated with the now defunct state ministry for food affairs, appointed Param to sell rice to the poor at half the average market price in a special operation in the capital.

The program was launched in the wake of the economic crisis that blighted the country in late 1997 when millions of people could not afford to buy the food staple.

The agency's distribution division chief Ibnu Shihab denied allegations that his staff had committed irregularities, saying that the rice might have spoiled after being kept too long in the storehouse.

He said the WFP's rice donations from the United States were of low quality, prompting Dolog to ask the WFP to provide better quality rice from other countries.

Farid, however, said Dolog should be made responsible for storing the donated rice properly and maintaining its quality so as not to create health hazards for consumers.

Farid said there were indications that some Dolog officials had sold the good quality rice to various markets in Jakarta and allocated the spoiled stocks from the storehouse to the poor. He did not elaborate.

Strongly protesting against the Agency, Farid symbolically returned seven of the 50 tons of spoiled rice to Dolog. The rice should have been sold at Rp 1,000 per kilogram, or at about half the average market price.

During the first three months of the WFP rice provision program, the commodity was sold to some 12,000 families every week in the city's 10 subdistricts.

Farid said the quality of rice received by Param since last August had been deteriorating. As many as 85,000 tons of rice were sold at special prices for the poor during market operations, 21,250 tons of which were distributed by Param.

Farid noted that Param members learned in December that some of the rice from the U.S. which should have been sold at a special price was transported to a flour factory in Cirebon, West Java. The factory bought it at Rp 1,700 per kilogram.

Urging the WFP, the National Logistics Agency (Bulog) and Dolog Jaya to provide better quality rice for the poor in Greater Jakarta areas, Farid said Dolog should clarify to the public the circumstances of the sale of the WFP donated rice to the flour factory. (06)