The government plans to plant rice side by side with sugar palms, energy crops or other plants with an intercropping system.
he government plans to convert a total of 20 million hectares of forest across Indonesia into agricultural land to produce food, energy and water for the country’s self-sufficiency program.
Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni said the Agriculture Ministry and the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry will make use of the forest land, including to establish several small food barns on top of large-scale food estate projects.
“Together with the Agriculture Ministry, we have identified around 20 million ha that could be used [to produce] food, energy and water reserves,” he said in Jakarta on Thursday, as reported by Bloombergtechnoz.
Read also: Govt to slash corn, salt, sugar import quotas for 2025
Raja Juli went on to say that the government is planning to utilize 1.1 million ha of the total land area to plant dryland rice, a variety of rice grown in a dry environment, which is expected to have an annual production capacity of 3.5 tonnes of rice per hectare.
General Soedirman University in Central Java will supply the dryland rice seeds.
The government is aiming to secure additional rice stocks of up to 3.5 million tonnes per year from the program, equivalent to the amount of rice imports in 2023.
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