Indonesian Govt Guarantee Food Stocks During Ramadan

Jakarta, MINA – The Indonesian government through the Ministry of Agriculture guarantees food supplies during Ramadan amid a safe COVID-19 pandemic with sufficient reserves for the next few months.

In a joint teleconference with the Task Force for the Acceleration of Handling COVID-19, Minister of Agriculture Syahrul Yasin Limpo ensured that the balance of food needs was good and well controlled.

“From our national food balance, we actually have a good balance sheet that is well controlled, quite available,” said Yasin on Sunday, April 26.

In addition, Ministry of Agriculture guarantees people’s food solutions so that food stocks are available for Indonesia’s 267 million population.

At present, the national food balance has a reserve surplus of approximately 3.5 million tons. While in the February to May paddy fields were able to produce 12.4 million tons of rice.

If the stock is added at the Logistics Agency (Bulog) and in the mills, there will be a total stock of 15 million tons of rice.

In this case, the Ministry of Agriculture has three choice approaches in the national food scheme which are optimistic, moderate and pessimistic in view of the state of land that can produce rice and aspects of distribution to the community.

From the optimistic side, he said, there are 15 million tons of national rice stock and 7.6 million tons of national rice needed in the February-May period. If so, there will be more than 7 million tons of remaining stock.

While with a moderate approach, he continued, from the 3.5 million tons of existing stock and the scheme of rice production capability down 4 percent from 12.4 million tons, only 11 million tons remained. While the need for rice rose to 7.6 million to 7.9 million tons, there would still be a remaining stock in the range of 7 million tons of rice.

Then through a pessimistic approach, said Yasin, with a stock of 3.5 million tons, production of 11.2 million tons while national rice needs 8.3 million, the remaining 6 million tons of stock will be available until the end of May 2020.

“Then the fasting month and Eid al-Fitr are in safe control. We have validated the data to the regions. May Allah give, there is inayah so that this data becomes normative objective data, “Yasin concluded. (T/RE1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)