Chairman of the Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) Tulus Abadi admitted that he was surprised by the total ban on CPO exports and cooking oil delivered by President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) this Friday (22/4).
He was surprised because he assessed that a 20 percent export ban was actually enough for cooking oil to flood the market. Therefore, he called the ban a policy that ‘wasteful‘.
“It’s politically good, but what for? If it’s completely forbidden to absorb all? If only 20 percent of the DMO is distributed to the public, it’s already flooded with a sea of cooking oil,” he explained to CNNIndonesia.com, Friday (22/4) night.
Tulus believes that Jokowi’s policies have more negative impacts than positive ones. After all, the policy does not necessarily reduce the price of cooking oil in the market, but it will certainly cover the country’s income from export foreign exchange.
“If it’s not distributed the same way, the government will also lose itself because of the loss of export taxes. Where does export income come from? While CPO is large in value with coal, can the foreign exchange loss be zero percent?” he explained.
Not only that, Tulus also saw the potential for a trade war between Indonesia and other countries. According to him, the ban will make other countries protest strongly. This is because Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of CPO and international supplies have been disrupted due to the Ukraine-Russia war.
“In fact, disrupting the international market, maybe war with the international community, maybe that’s what Indonesia meant, so that prices on the international market as well as other countries are affected so that it can be lowered or something,” he explained.
“Maybe it can be like an international trade war, yes, so Indonesia fights international CPO prices by banning exports, later other countries will be affected and will scream,” added Tulus.
He predicts that the policy will only last temporarily, such as a ban on coal exports due to the large number of rejections that can come from various parties.
“It’s the same as the government forbids coal, it only lasts 4 days, I see this is just a bluff,” he concluded.
President Jokowi decided to ban the export of raw materials for cooking oil and cooking oil starting Thursday (28/4). This he decided in a meeting with his ministers.
“In the meeting, I decided to ban the export of raw materials for cooking oil and cooking oil starting Thursday, April 28, 2022 until the specified time limit,” he said Friday (22/4).
Jokowi stated that the decision was made so that the domestic supply of cooking oil would be abundant again and the price would be cheap.
(well / eight)
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