The government is optimistic that rice production will remain in surplus as projected this year despite growing worries that the prolonged dry season caused by the El Niño weather phenomena will cause rice harvest failures in many parts of the country.

Agriculture Minister Amran Sulaiman said in Jakarta on Wednesday that there would be a surplus in the production as expected despite the prolonged dry season that had seriously damaged crops in many parts of the country.

He argued that the impact of the El Niño would be minimal because it would only affect rice production between September and October. In such a production scenario, he said that Indonesia would not need to import rice to meet domestic demand.

Amran said that based on his ministry'€™s surveys, the drought only affected between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares of rice fields. According to him, widely published estimates that the drought had damaged over 14 million hectares of rice fields were exaggerated.

Fears over a possible rice supply shortage were raised following the scarcity of meat and chicken in the past several weeks, which have led to widespread strikes carried out by meat and chicken traders demanding that the government intervene to alleviate the problem.

Analysts believe that the shortages in supply occurred due to inaccurate data used by the government.

National Development Planning Minister Sofyan Djalil acknowledged on Tuesday that the government still used different sets of data in formulating its rice farming policy. '€œWithout accuracy in the data, it will affect the policy,'€ he said as quoted by Kompas.

Amran shrugged off the differences in data between the ministries. '€œIt'€™s normal to have different sets of data because the data collection might be done at different times. Even one day'€™s difference will yield different sets of data,'€ he said.

He said that his office still relied on production data issued by the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), which estimated that unhusked rice production would rise by about 6.64 percent to 75.5 million tons this year, or equivalent to 43.9 million tons of milled rice. With such a production assumption, the country'€™s rice production would reach a milled rice surplus of 10.5 million tons.

State Logistics Agency (Bulog) agreed on Wednesday to buy 1.4 million tons of rice from farmers as part of its program to increase its rice stocks, which at present stood at roughly 1.6 million tons.

'€œWith this addition, our rice stocks will be secure,'€ Bulog director Djarot Kusumayakti said.

Meanwhile, the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) declared in their official statement that they predicted that the drought would continue until December.

The rain would likely begin in November or December, the statement said.

Djarot also stated that the extreme weather phenomenon of El Niño would only affect areas south of the equator and that '€œthe northern part would not be hit by drought'€.

Climate experts have warned of the severity of El Niño this year, which is expected to match the intensity of 1997, which induced a prolonged drought and widespread wild fires. Although El Niño has yet to reach its peak, many regions in the country have already reported a prolonged dry season, with some regions in West Java, Central Java, South Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara and other places suffering from 60 continuous days without rain.

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