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Indonesia should find new markets for palm oil: Minister
Finance Minister Sri Mulyani has said that Indonesia should be aggressive in looking for new palm oil markets because of various problems in the traditional markets.
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A worker checks freshly harvested oil palm fruit loaded onto a truck in Pangkalan Bun, East Kalimantan. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
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inance Minister Sri Mulyani has said that Indonesia should be aggressive in looking for new palm oil markets because of various problems in the traditional markets, such as negative campaigns against the commodity and the impact of the ongoing trade war.
.kompas.com “We should not act defensively or just wait and see,” said Sri Mulyani when speaking in a seminar on palm oil organized by the Indonesian Oil Palm Estate Fund (BPDP-KS) in Jakarta on Monday as reported by kompas.com.
“When I worked for the World Bank, I visited many countries in Africa and Latin America. They already had initiatives to develop palm oil. Many companies in Asia, particularly Malaysia, wanted to enter the palm oil business [there].”
She expressed confidence that the export potential of palm oil remained high amid current challenges, particularly in nontraditional markets.
As the largest palm oil producing country, Indonesia produced 37.8 million tons of CPO in 2017, with exports valued at US$21.25 billion, according to the Agriculture Ministry.
However, Sri Mulyani said Indonesian palm oil businesspeople tended to be content with being domestic players and acted defensively in facing global market challenges.
“If we become major players in the world’s palm oil business, we can set the rules. We can formulate and influence policy,” she said, adding that the fund needed to cooperate with the palm oil industry to create a strategy to enter nontraditional markets. (bbn)
