An agricultural expert has criticized a plan by the Indonesian government to import three million tons of rice this year, calling such a decision as reckless.
“We call the decision to import rice as haphazard, without basis, without data and without calculation,” Prof. Dwi Andreas Santosa, a lecturer at the Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), told a discussion in Jakarta on Tuesday, January 23, 2024.
He said the government initially planned to import two million tons of rice in 2024. However, Indonesia has had import commitment of two million tons of rice from Thailand and another one million from India that it eventually decided to import a total of three million tons of rice this year.
Earlier, Coordinating Minister for the Economy Airlangga Hartarto said that the government planned to import three million tons of rice in 2024 as a measure to overcome rice deficit due to the prolonged drought as a result of El Nino weather phenomenon.
“Last year we imported around 3.5 million (tons) of rice. Three million has entered Indonesia, while the remaining 500 thousand is expected to enter in January,” Airlangga told a media conference after the handover of packages of rice assistance in Garut Regency, West Java, on Saturday.
Andreas said the government’s assumption that national rice production will drop sharply due to El Nino was not quite right as in reality rice production has only dropped by 2.5 percent.
He said further that the government’s decision to import three million tons of rice will hard hit the farmers. Based on his estimate, rice production will increase by 3-5 percent in 2024 or around 0.9 to 1.5 million tons and at the same time the imported three million tons will arrive. As demand for most agricultural products is inelastic, a huge supply of rice will inevitably cause its price to drop. ” The biggest losers will then be the farmers,” he said.
According to Andreas, the government and the private sector imported 3.3 million tons of rice in 2023, some 2.7 million tons were imported by the government and the remaining 300 thousand by the private sector. This 2023 rice import was the biggest rice imports in the country in the last 25 years.
“If the Statistic Indonesia said it is the biggest import in the last five years, my database says it is the biggest import in the last 25 years,” he said.
