Jakarta –
The Minister of Trade (Mendag) Muhammad Lutfi and the President Director of Perum Bulog Budi Waseso or who is familiarly called Buwas have different assessments of stocks to imports rice. Lutfi assessed that rice imports were needed because there were concerns that the harvest yield would miss predictions. The reason is, during this harvest season which runs during March-April, it is still occasionally accompanied by the rainy season.
This condition can prevent a lot of unhulled rice from being stocked at Perum Bulog. This is because Perum Bulog cannot distort wet grain.
Lutfi explained that the rice stock at Perum Bulog is currently the lowest in history. As of March, the rice stock at Perum Bulog has not reached 500,000 tons. In fact, Bulog should have stocked between 1-1.5 million tons of rice each year.
“Bulog’s stock is less than 1 million tons. According to the Managing Director of Bulog, there is imported rice in 2018 that has decreased in quality. According to my calculation, the quality drop from 2018 is around 270,000 tons. So what has been said has decreased the quality is 160,000 tons, so there are 120,000. “So, Bulog’s final stock of approximately 800,000 tons is reduced by the 2018 import stock of 300,000, so Bulog’s stock only, may not reach 500,000 tons,” Lutfi said in a virtual press conference, Friday (19/3/2021).
“This is one of the lowest in the history of Bulog. So you can know how my heart feels,” continued Lutfi.
Until now, Bulog has only been able to absorb about 85,000 tonnes rice from the harvest. In fact, Bulog should be able to stock up 400,000-500,000 tons of rice to reach the ideal stock standard of 1 million tons.
This has become a consideration for the government in planning to import rice, which has recently been hotly debated by the public. Then, what is Buwas’ assessment of rice imports and stocks
According to Buwas, he does not necessarily carry out the planned 1 million tonnes of rice imports. Because, for this year, there is no setback for the harvest season like last year. The harvest period this year occurs in March-April, so that the estimation, Bulog can absorb as much as 390,800 tons of Government Rice Reserve (CBP) rice.
So far, Bulog’s rice stock has reached 883,585 tons, consisting of CBP rice as much as 859,877 tons and commercial rice with 23,708 tons. This means that after the main harvest, Bulog’s CBP stock at the end of April was above 1 million tons of rice and this amount had already met CBP per year, so rice imports were no longer needed.
“In principle, we prioritize domestic production for CBP, even though we get the task of importing (rice) 1 million, we will not necessarily carry it out because we still prioritize domestic production, which peaks from March to April,” Buwas said in a hearing with Commission IV of the Indonesian House of Representatives, Monday (15/3/2021).
Buwas detailed, Bulog still had imported rice stocks from last 2018. As for the total procurement of 1,785,450 tons rice, there are still 275,811 tons of rice that have not been distributed. Of this amount, 106,642 tonnes of which was deteriorated rice.
(hns / hns)
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