Transportation Ministry to store Bulog's rice imports

Transportation Ministry to store Bulog's rice imports

JAKARTA (JP): The Ministry of Transportation said yesterday that the National Logistics Agency (Bulog) can use the port's warehouses to store its rice imports which have been held up on waiting vessels and causing congestion in local seaports.

Director General of Sea Transportation Soentoro said in a hearing with Commission V of the House of Representatives here yesterday that the vessels docked in Jakarta's Tanjung Priok Port can unload and store their rice in the port's warehouses.

Soentoro's remarks came in response to recent news reports that thousands of tons of rice are being held up on vessels which could not berth at Tanjung Priok. Tanjung Priok's management, added the reports, has been unable to handle the inflow of goods.

Soentoro has said that the problem could be alleviated by using the port's facilities if the warehouses of Bulog, which manages the country's rice stocks, are unable to hold the incoming rice.

"Unloading a vessel, storing goods at the port's warehouses and transporting them by trucks is a standard cargo-handling procedure," he said.

"But now people want to unload the cargo immediately onto trucks... And when the trucks are not ready, port congestion occurs," he told the commission for transportation, telecommunications and public works affairs.

Soentoro pointed out that the port does not impose a fee on goods stocked at storehouses for the first five days.

"So the terms are actually very friendly... But I don't know why the agency is not interested," he told reporters after the hearing.

Reliable sources say that Bulog's storehouses are currently packed with goods owned by the Goro retail store -- a subsidiary of the Humpuss Group -- and thus unable to accommodate the rice imports.

Executives of Goro and Humpuss were unavailable for confirmation yesterday.

Soentoro explained yesterday that since 1995, when Bulog began importing rice, he has asked the agency to distribute incoming cargo to various ports in Cirebon and Banten in West Java, Semarang in Central Java and Surabaya in East Java.

"I tried telling them to avoid using only Tanjung Priok," he said.

"Now I hear that Bulog's storehouses are full and they are short of trucks." (pwn)