I

ndonesia must reduce rice imports and achieve staple food self-sufficiency if it wants to meet the increasing demand from its burgeoning population of 237.6 million people, experts say.

“With such large population, it is impossible for Indonesia to rely on imports,” National Food Security Agency Director Achmad Suryana said on Monday on the sidelines of a discussion titled “Population and the Food Crisis”.

He said self-sufficiency was essential since other nations’ food surpluses would not be enough to meet Indonesian demand.

“We should prioritize local production to meet rising demands for food. Imports are the last resort,”
he said.

Indonesia is one of Asia’s largest rice-consuming nations, according to reports. The Agriculture Ministry said that Indonesia’s annual rice production topped 38 million tons — just 4 million tons more than the 34 million tons needed to feed the population, based on a national per capita rice consumption rate of 130 kilograms a year.

“With such a surplus, we will have rice stocks enough for two months only,” Achmad said.

Population growth and higher per capita demand have aggravated the problem.

“We need to add 490,000 tons to the rice supply this year, due to higher rice consumption, which has reached 139.15 kilograms per capita,” Achmad said.

About 121,000 hectares of the nation’s 21 million hectares of agricultural lands were converted to non-agricultural purposes between 2003 and 2008, and 27,000 hectares were converted between 2008 and 2009, according to the National Statistics Agency.

The Indonesian government has implemented development policies that have marginalized the agricultural sector over the last two decades, according to speakers at a panel organized by the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF) on Tuesday.

On the macro level, for example, the agricultural sector’s contribution to the nation’s GDP decreased to 14.29 percent between 2004 and 2010. Indonesia’s paddy productivity was 0.62 percent in 2010, down from 2.15 percent in 2009 and 4.02 percent in 2008.

More than 41 million people, 38.34 percent of the nation’s workforce, depended on the agriculture sector for their livelihood.

“Such poor performance from the agriculture sector shows that the government has ignored two main things: food security and the work force,” INDEF executive director Achmad Erani Yustika said.

He said the government had systematically marginalized agriculture through policies that provided small allocations to the sector, for example.

He said that the government allocated about Rp 10 trillion (US$1.14 billion), only 0.9 percent of its total budget, to the sector. “Many government policies for agriculture, such as providing free prime seeds and subsidized fertilizer, have failed to reach the targeted farmers,” he said.

Instead of protecting local products, the government continued to import commodities, removing import taxes on some prime commodities such as rice and wheat flour, he said.

Achmad said “we would perhaps get a nickname as ‘the second biggest rice importer in the world’, if Indonesia’s plan to import 1.75 million tons of rice was realized.

“With uncontrolled price increases, people may still face difficulties in meeting their food needs, although adequate food stocks are available,” INDEF’s Evi Noor Afifah said, adding that a 10 percent increase in the proce of rice would create 2.5 million new poor people. (ebf)