“The Reason Behind RI Needing to Import 2 Million Tons of Rice Revealed”

Jakarta –

Head of the National Food Agency (Bapanas) Arief Prasetyo Adi explained the reasons for this rice imports of 2 million tonnes until the end of 2023. One of the reasons is because the absorption of grain from the main harvest has not been able to meet the stock of the Government Rice Reserve (CBP).

“The President’s order is to absorb as much (rice) as possible. So far, only 50,000 tons have been absorbed,” he said after the Food Rembug event at the Bapanas Office, South Jakarta, Monday (27/3/2023).

“To make a bitter decision earlier (rice imports) is not the Food Agency itself, there are internal meetings, related ministries/institutions, all of them are there, including the Ministry of Agriculture (Ministry of Agriculture) and the Ministry of Trade (Ministry of Trade),” he continued.

According to Arief, before deciding to import rice, Bapanas had invited 25 large rice mills to increase rice stocks.

“When the (Bulog rice) stock was 220,000 tons, we all felt the need to top up BULOG stock. A few days earlier, we invited 25 large rice millers, we asked for help to top up BULOG’s stock, the result was only 60,000 tons. So the business was done. we do everything,” said Arief.

Bapanas also invited other big producers, such as Wilmar, Top Koki, and Sumber Raya. However, they said they were still very limited in meeting their own rice stocks, so that the rice mill was only able to deposit around 1,000-5,000 tons to BULOG.

When stocks were limited, Bulog was assigned to provide as many as 21,353 million Beneficiary Families (KPM) with 10 kg of rice each. If the program runs for 3 months, with Bulog’s rice stock reserves of around 220 thousand tons, the total rice demand will reach 640 thousand tons.

“If Bulog goes once, from one month it’s all disbursed, Bulog’s stock is more or less zero. Do you want to let Bulog’s stock go to zero?” he said.

Meanwhile, Perpadi Chairperson Sutarto Alimoeso added, when viewed from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) data, there are differences in the surplus data from January to April this year with the previous year.

“If we look at this year’s BPS figures from January to April, it turns out that we indeed have a surplus of three months, but the surplus is smaller compared to last year in the same month, January to April. If I’m not mistaken, last year it was 2022 as much as The surplus is 3.6 million tons, while this year until April, it is estimated that it was only 3.22 million tons. So there is a difference,” he explained.

This is in line with the results of a survey conducted by his party in several provinces. The uptake that goes into the rice mill is less than 50% of the current normal conditions.

“This means that the previous shortage has had an impact to this day on the rice mill. Even though the rice mill, for example, normally produces 2,000 (tons), now only under 1,000 (tons) enter the rice mill,” he said.

According to him, things like this might be a consideration for the government to import rice.

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