T

he Ministry of Trade has set May 20 as the National Products Awakening Day in a bid to help people consume locally-produced goods.

“The producers and their markets are already available here. Now it depends on us whether we are willing to consume locally-made products,” Deputy Minister of Trade Bayu Krisnamurthi said on Sunday in Semarang, Central Java, on the sidelines of the launching of the National Products Awakening Day.

The deputy minister said that out of 40 million businesspeople in Indonesia, more than 95 percent work in small-scale businesses. With such huge resources, both in terms of operators and the wide variety of products they produce, Indonesia should have been able to compete with other countries, he said.

In many cases, local products could not compete with imported goods due to poor promotion, even though in terms of quality and uniqueness they were equal.

Bayu explained that the momentum of the National Awakening Day was intentionally chosen for the launching of the National Products Awakening Day. This was used to remind Indonesian people that they could awake as long as they help each other, he said.

If local products are consumed by their own people, the welfare of the producers will surely be strengthened, thereby improving the grass roots economic turnover, he said.

“Hopefully, within the next 20 years, locally-made products can be widely consumed. If not starting now, when?” Bayu asked.

Vera Therik, a garment businessman from East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), said that cloth with NTT characteristics has prospects, but still had not been completely developed. Turnover reaches hundreds of millions of rupiah with consumers coming from various countries, including Australia, China and European
nations.

“The problem is that we are hindered by inadequate supplies of raw materials,” she said. The condition is worsened by limited training in remote areas by the government. That is why even though the market is there, many people do not pay attention to traditional cloth products.

Mulyanto, a businessman specializing in cloth with Jepara characteristics, urged the government to aggressively disseminate the process of tax payments for small-scale businessmen.

Such dissemination, he said, is important to help businessmen who mostly do not know how to fulfill their tax obligations. “We want to pay our taxes, but do not know how to do it,” Mulyanto said.

In conjunction with the launching of the Local Products Awakening Day, its committee also held an exhibition of a wide variety of products and food.

“We also hold competitions on how to cook and produce beverages with local flavor with 26 participants from six provinces. To make them more serious, we invite professional cooking judges such as Bondan Winarno and William Wongso,” said director general of domestic trade Gunaryo.

Aside from Central Java, eight other provinces taking part in the three-day exhibition are Lampung, Riau Islands, East Java, East Nusa Tenggara, South Kalimantan, Southeast Sulawesi, North Sulawesi and Maluku.