TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsThe Hormuz crisis and Indonesia’s food security time bomb
The Strait of Hormuz crisis has exposed our energy fragility. But the far graver threat, one that could unravel the nation, is food.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
A person points at a page on the Marinetraffic website that shows commercial shipping traffic on the edge of the Strait of Hormuz near the Iranian coast, on March 4 in Paris. (AFP/Julien De Rosa)
B
rent crude surged nearly 20 percent on Monday morning, breaching US$111 per barrel for the first time since July 2022. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global oil and a third of liquefied natural gas transit daily, has been effectively shut since Feb. 28, when Iran closed the waterway following US-Israeli military strikes.
For Indonesia, a net oil importer that consumes 1.6 million barrels per day but produces only 608,000, the fiscal arithmetic is punishing. The 2026 state budget assumed an Indonesian crude price of $70. Every single-dollar increase above that adds Rp 10.3 trillion in subsidy costs while returning only Rp 3.6 trillion in revenue. The budget is already underwater.
Public attention has understandably fixed on fuel prices and the government has acknowledged that subsidized fuel may rise. Indonesia’s energy reserves cover roughly 25 days. But a parallel vulnerability, one that carries even graver consequences, is receiving almost no attention: food.
Geographically, Indonesia may be among the safest nations in this conflict. If the war escalates and producing nations redirect grain and fertilizer to their own populations, as Russia did with wheat in 2022, Indonesia will be left competing on the open market with dwindling supply and surging prices.
In a prolonged conflict, the country’s food security comes down to what it has stored and what it can grow with the inputs it already holds. As Sukarno, our founding father, once warned: food is a matter of life and death for a nation; if the people’s food needs are not met, it is a catastrophe.
The link between the Hormuz crisis and Indonesia’s food supply runs through fertilizer. Roughly 40 percent of global urea exports pass through the strait. Urea is the primary input for Indonesian agriculture. When gas prices soar, urea costs follow; when supply is physically cut, the next planting season is in jeopardy.
The Agriculture Minister has reassured the public that national rice stocks can last 324 days. That number, however, bundles state-owned logistics agency Bulog warehouses with standing crops still in the field and rice sitting in household kitchens and traders’ shops, none of which the government controls. Strip all of that away and what the state can actually deploy in a crisis is Bulog’s strategic reserve: 3.76 million tons, enough to feed the country for roughly 44 days. And even that figure assumes normal logistics.
