U.S. cocoa quarantine costs RI producers

JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Cocoa Association said yesterday that the country's cocoa exporters were likely to look for new markets if the United States did not lift its tight inspection of the Indonesian commodity.

The association's executive director, P.S. Siswoputranto, said yesterday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had been applying a policy since 1992 to automatically quarantine cocoa imported from three countries -- Indonesia, Brazil and Malaysia -- for pest and disease control.

He said the policy had caused a great loss to Indonesian exporters since they had to pay for storage during the examination process, which could take days or weeks, and a fee for the examination.

"I think the U.S. government needs to lift the restriction soon. Otherwise local exporters will look for other markets in areas like Europe and Russia where the demand for Indonesian cocoa is high and rules are less strict than in the U.S.," Siswoputranto said on the sideline of the U.S.-Indonesia Food and Agriculture Forum.

He said the U.S. imposed the quarantine on the suspicion that cocoa from Indonesia carried insects.

According to Siswoputranto, only Indonesia still faced the restriction as Brazil had stopped exporting to the U.S. due to a shortfall in domestic output while Malaysia also stopped exporting cocoa because it had converted many cocoa estates into other commodities.

The head of the agricultural office in South Sulawesi -- the country's largest cocoa producing area -- Soewondo, recently said the U.S. quarantine policy had inflicted at least Rp 28 billion (about US$7.5 million) in losses on cocoa exporters from the province.

According to the association's data, Indonesia is currently the world's third largest cocoa producer after the Ivory Coast and Ghana with an output of about 275,000 tons of cocoa beans a year, or about 10 percent of the world's supply. More than 60 percent of the country's cocoa output is from South Sulawesi.

South Sulawesi exported 93,466 tons of cocoa beans to the U.S in 1996, or 21 percent of total U.S. cocoa imports that year.

Aside from the U.S., Indonesia also exports cocoa to about 20 other countries.

Siswoputranto called on the U.S. government to replace the automatic quarantine with a mandatory refumigation of all Indonesian cocoa beans directly after unloading at the country's ports to reduce the cost to Indonesian exporters.

If the cocoa was refumigated immediately after arrival -- not after days or weeks of being stored at warehouses -- Indonesian exporters could save warehouse costs, he said.

Siswoputranto said local cocoa exporters had applied improved quality controls on the cocoa with assistance from the Ministry of Agriculture to meet U.S. standards.

They always fumigated cocoa before exporting it, he said.

Also, the government was constructing two warehouses for cocoa beans at two main cocoa outbound ports -- Ujungpandang and Medan -- in order to further protect it from pests or disease prior to export, he added.

"If cocoa is mixed with other commodities at warehouses prior to shipment, chances are high that it will be infested with pests or disease from other commodities," explained Siswuputranto.

He noted that the measures would not guarantee that the commodity would be free of insects when it arrived in the U.S.

He said a shipment of cocoa to the U.S. took 40 days, which was enough time for the cocoa to be infested with pests on the ship during the trip.

In comparison, Siswoputranto said, cocoa from West Africa, which was free from U.S. inspection, took only 10 days to reach the U.S. by ship. The shipment period was too short a time for pests on the ships to infest the cocoa. (jsk)