Jakarta, April 6 (Antara) - As an agricultural country with the fourth-largest population in the world, reaching over 250 million, Indonesia has to maintain its food resilience for the people.
The agricultural sector is the main pillar of the country's food sector. Therefore, it should be supported by an efficient irrigation system.
To this end, the government is aware of the importance of having adequate irrigation infrastructure to support its agricultural system, which will facilitate the production of food commodities in the long run.
"We have to sit together to discuss the issues related to the irrigation sector as it has a crucial role in supporting the country's food resilience," Chief Economic Minister Darmin Nasution stated in Jakarta on Tuesday (April 4).
In an effort to build the country's irrigation system, the government is gathering data on irrigated farmland; including primary, secondary, and tertiary rice fields; river basin areas; and agricultural land conversion.
"We are making these efforts as part of the government's endeavors to maintain production and price stability of food commodities, particularly rice," Nasution affirmed.
The central government is tasked with building dams as well as primary and secondary irrigation systems, while the provincial and district governments are responsible for tertiary irrigation development.
The government currently only has data on damaged or inadequate primary and secondary irrigation systems and has yet to collect concrete data on the tertiary irrigation system.
Therefore, the government must undertake follow-up efforts to consolidate and coordinate among relevant ministries on agricultural land data and the acreage of irrigated land. It should also assimilate data on dams and river basin areas to maintain their water supplies.
The development of dams is of utmost importance. According to President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), the government's plan to build dozens of dams across the country is part of the nation's preparations to make Indonesia self-reliant in food production.
The government will continue to build dams, and the work on several of them is expected to be completed within five years, he emphasized.
"This year, we will complete eight and next year, nine. The key to progress is water supply," he said while inaugurating the Nipah Dam in Montor Village in the district of Sampang on the island of Madura in East Java last month (March 19).
He pointed out that later as the global population increases, people across the world will compete for two basic needs, which are energy and food.
"Due to the increasing population globally, men would compete for two needs, which are energy and food," he stated.
Thus, dams and irrigation systems must be reinforced.
National Development Planning Minister/Head of the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) Sofyan Djalil remarked that coordination among relevant ministries to formulate priority programs and the funding scheme in 2017 was necessary to ensure that the efforts to build irrigation systems would run effectively.
"We want the government's programs to be implemented based on complete data from all ministries," Djalil stated.
The agricultural ministry is part of the 10 ministries (ranked tenth), which received the largest budget in 2016, amounting to Rp31.5 trillion, a slight increase from Rp30 trillion allocated in 2015.
After all, Indonesia, which has two seasons of dry and wet spells, needs to develop its dams and irrigation systems to overcome desolation during droughts, so that the country's 7.5 million hectares of rice fields can be optimally utilized to support the government's food resilience program.
As part of the efforts to maintain the country's food resilience, the government is also encouraging the development of the agricultural downstream industry.
According to Industry Minister Saleh Husin, the development of the agro-processing industry in the downstream sector can help ensure Indonesia's food sovereignty.
"As part of the national industrial policy, the upstream and downstream agriculture-related industry offers a huge opportunity to agri-businesses to develop the agricultural products based industry in the future," Saleh noted in a press statement after attending the Agrinex Expo at the Jakarta Convention Center in Jakarta on Friday (April 1).
The minister hoped that the Agrinex Expo would create business opportunities to bring together the processing industries and the agriculture sector. The sector can then become the provider of raw materials.
Such a move will be in line with the aim of the first phase (2015-2019) of the National Long-Term Development Plan (RPJPN), which is to increase the added value of natural resources in the agro-based upstream industries, he stated.
To support the development of the downstream agricultural industry, the government has encouraged to increase the production of downstream agricultural products.
Since last year, the government has been prioritizing the development of agriculture, particularly in the food crop sector, in the efforts to maintain food resilience and improve the welfare of farmers, to meet domestic food requirements, and to remove dependence on imports.
To achieve the goals, the government has been taking steps to improve the irrigation system and to provide agricultural tools to farmers.
Farmers were offered production equipment, such as hand tractors and harvesting machines, to increase rice productivity.
It also reframed the cycles of the country's crop planting and harvesting seasons to avoid simultaneous and overlapping harvest times. Thus, food crop prices for farmers could consistently be maintained at favorable levels. ***3***(A014/INE)EDITED BY INE
(T.A014/A/BESSR/F. Assegaf) 06-04-2016 15:32:4 |
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