Jakarta, June 29 (Antara) - Rice is the staple food in Indonesia that needs to be regulated and developed in an effort to maintain the country's food resilience.
The Indonesian government should therefore introduce better rice import regulations, increase rice output, and maintain it amid declining rice farm land, researchers said.
Hence, they asked the government to create a regulation that can encourage a healthy competition in importing rice in order to meet the needs of food in Indonesia.
"The government should open up opportunities for other eligible companies to participate in the import of rice and other foodstuffs," Hizkia Respatiadi, researcher on trade and people's welfare of the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS) stated in Jakarta on Tuesday (June 27).
In addition to creating a healthy competition, the government, through the issuance of such an import regulation, can also make the price of rice competitive and beneficial for consumers.
CIPS also wants the government to focus on international trade to meet domestic demand for rice to offset the problem of land availability in the country. "Indonesia needs a policy that ensures food security for the people, by focusing on international trade and allowing the private sector to participate in food trade," Hana Nabila, another researcher on food trade of CIPS, noted.
The current policy cannot be maintained because the availability of land to grow rice in Indonesia has continued to decline. Nabila argued that the decline in the land is, among others, indicated by the reduction of 24.2 thousand hectares of farm land from 2014 to 2015.
She also warned that the number of labor in the agricultural sector had also decreased 3.9 million people from the period of 2002-2014. "Indonesia does not produce enough rice to meet domestic demand and suitable land for rice cultivation is not enough. Therefore, the younger generation will no longer be farmers because the wages earned are not proportional to the energy spent," she remarked.
In order to produce adequate rice, the Association of Indonesian Farm Community (HKTI) hopes to grow superior rice varieties over 5 thousand hectares of fields until end of Aug 2017, to increase rice productivity.
Chief of the national executive council of HKTI, retired army General Moeldoko, said planting of the varieties of M70D and M400 was already in progress in over thousand hectares of rice fields in East Java and Central Java .
"The result is very satisfactory," the former chief of the Indonesian military (TNI) said in Trenggalek, East Java, after socializing the program together with farmers' representatives and Islamic boarding house community on Friday (June 23).
The two varieties are superior in productivity, which is higher than the productivity of other varieties in general, and they need shorter time for harvest. This efficient and productive cultivation is expected to reduce the high price of rice at home.
Previously, the Indonesian Rice Milling and Rice Association (Perpadi) assessed the use of excessive fertilizers to be one of the factor causing hike in rice prices in Indonesia when compared to rice sold in several Southeast Asian countries.
"Vietnam and Thailand are cheaper because of their wider ownership, and the use of fertilizers is low because they rely on Mekong river, and the use may be only one tenth of us," Perpadi Chairman Soetarto Alimoeso revealed in a discussion on Farmers Welfare in Jakarta on Wednesday (June 21).
Alimoeso noted that the use of rice fertilizers in Indonesia, for example in Karawang, can reach 500 kilograms per hectare, whereas the dose of fertilizer used holds a large portion of the selling price of rice. On the other hand, neighboring countries, such as Vietnam and Thailand, use fertilizers only about one-tenth of the average fertilizer use by farmers in the Republic of Indonesia.
However, the introduction of the varieties of M70D and M400 is expected to increase efficiency and rice production.
Moeldoko said that the first harvest has been successful for the M400 variety at the pilot projects, with a productivity of 9.6 tons per hectare in Jember and 9.2 tons per hectare in Jombang (East Java).
Harvest of M400 rice variety in a number of areas in Central Java and partly in West Java had always been above 9 tons per hectare, he added. Harvest of the M70D variety takes place in 70 days on average, with result of between 6.5 tons and 7 tons per hectare.
"These two varieties have been grown in various areas at present," he explained.
After the success of growing the varieties of M70D and M400 in over 1 thousand hectares of lands in East Java and Central Java, HKTI plans expansion of plantations, especially for the M400 variety, until end of August, he noted.
To ensure success in reaching the target, Moeldoko and other executives of HKTI in the provinces and district areas would continue socialization of the two varieties.
"Other superiority of the two varieties is that they do not need pesticide and other chemicals that could damage the quality of the soil," Moeldoko pointed out.
The government has carried out different programs over the past few years and succeeded in increasing the country's rice output.
With the success in carrying out its programs, the government had increased unhusked rice production to 79 million tons last year, exceeding its target of 76 million tons of unhusked rice, and stopped importing rice in 2016.
"Indonesia will not need to import rice, and it could even export the commodity to other countries," Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman revealed in the village of Bhakti Rasa, Sragi subdistrict, South Lampung late last year (Dec 29).
National production of unhulled rice rose to 79 million tons in 2016, from 74 million tons of unhulled rice in 2015 and 70 million tons in 2014.***3***(A014/INE)
EDITED BY INE/H-YH(T.A014/A/BESSR/A/Yosep) 29-06-2017 17:12 |
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