Indonesia's Growing Dependence on Imported Rice Makes Food Self-Sufficiency Hard to Achieve: Indef

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Tauhid Ahmad, a senior economist at the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef), questioned Indonesia's ability to achieve food self-sufficiency in the next three years. According to him, major challenges in food production, especially rice, make it difficult to achieve the goal of food self-sufficiency without massive extensification efforts.

"Food self-sufficiency means producing these goods to meet our needs 100 percent. No imports," he told Tempo in Central Jakarta on Wednesday, August 14.

Tauhid said he doubted food self-sufficiency would be achieved in three years without massive extensification, highlighting the increase in the volume of rice Indonesia imports year after year.

"The reality is that last year we still imported around 2.4 to 3 million tons of rice. This year it will also be 3 million tons or even more," he said.

A major obstacle to achieving food self-sufficiency, he said is that Java's fertile land is being converted rapidly. On the other hand, efforts to develop new land outside Java have not shown significant results.

"In the past five years, rice production has been declining despite efforts to expand land outside Java," he added.

Tauhid added that there will be other challenges arising from government programs such as the free school lunch program. There will be more demand for domestic needs than before. According to him, with the additional demand for the free lunch program, efforts to achieve food self-sufficiency will become more challenging unless accompanied by significant land expansion.

"Domestic demand for the nutritious lunch program is estimated to increase significantly and could reach 4 to 6 million tons per year," he explained.

He underlined that efforts to reduce reliance on rice as a staple food are also making slow progress due to Indonesians' dependence on rice consumption.

"Despite efforts to diversify food, such as the introduction of wheat, rice consumption still dominates more than 90 percent of our food needs. This dependence makes it more difficult to achieve food self-sufficiency."

TEMPO.CO

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