Agriculture Minister, Andi Amran Sulaiman, expressed optimism that Indonesia would be the food storehouse by year 2045.
This was reiterated by Minister Amran when delivering a guest lecture titled Indonesia towards World Food Storehouse 2045 in the Auditorium of Faculty of Agriculture UGM on Monday (12/3).
In front of hundreds of UGM students, the Minister explained the measures taken to realise this goal. One of those was by deregulation.
“Good regulation shall continue, but the ones that are not are revoked,” he said.
One of the regulations that had been improved was on fertilisers procurement done by tender, because it turned out to be a great loss to farmers.
“Fertilisers procurement is done by tender but the fertilisers would just arrive after the harvest. If this happened throughout Indonesia, the losses incurred up to Rp40 trillion,” he said.
In his opinion, inappropriate policy or regulation would bring significant impact to farmers as well as the state.
Another measure to meet the goal of Indonesia being the world food storehouse is to apply the anti-corruption attitude in the Agriculture Ministry. A food task force had been established to address the issue, involving the Anti-corruption Commission as well. Still another measure already in place is the conversion of inactive lands to agricultural lands to increase the size of the agricultural lands.
In this event Minister Amran asked the UGM students to contribute to the development of agriculture, for example by developing plant varieties that can increase national agricultural productivity.
Meanwhile, Dean of Faculty of Agriculture, Dr. Jamhari, said the Faculty was ready to support the government programme in realising its agricultural goals. Jamhari mentioned UGM commitment in supporting national agricultural sector was among others by establishing PT. Pagilaran tea company in 1964 that has now involved some 7 thousand farmers.
“We also developed superior variety of black bean known as Malika and digital Desa apps to enable better agriculture for farmers and discussion with agriculture experts,” he said.