BANDUNG – As many countries in the world facing the problem of high inflation that may lead to global recession, Indonesia is still able to control it with the main support of the agricultural and plantation products, especially the palm oil.

“Currently, the world is dealing with very high inflation. For example, Turkey is now seeing an inflation of 69.97%, Argentina 55.1%, Brazil 16.7%, Russia 12% and the USA 8.3%. But we in  Indonesia only see an inflation of 4.35%,” the agriculture ministry’s Plantation Seedling Director M. Saleh Mokhtar said when opening the second national conference of Indonesian planters  (SNPI), which was attended by InfoSAWIT in Bandung, West Java on Wednesday, 19 October 2022.

1. Saleh said that Indonesia’s success in keeping the inflation at relatively low level was mainly supported by its success in managing the agricultural and plantation sectors. “The agricultural sector, especially the plantations, stands as the cushion of Indonesian economy. The sector has shown its best performances during the last three years. During the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, the sector kept growing steadily while other sectors collapsed. We have to keep such a momentum, so that Indonesian economy will recover and keep growing,” he said.
2. Saleh said that the oil palm plantations alone directly employ 4.2 million workers and indirectly 12 million workers. Of Indonesia’s total 16.38 million hectares of oil palm plantations, around 6.7 million hectares are owned by smallholders who can be the partners of the planters.

According to him, around 2.78 million hectares of the oil palm plantations are potential to join the replanting program as they are already old. “Those include the young oil palm trees with lower productivity as they are probably grown from less quality seedlings,” he said.

In 2021, the average productivity of Indonesia’s oil palm plantations was only 3.9 tons per hectare per year, which is far below its potential at 5-8 tons per hectare per year.

“Increasing the oil palm productivity is still our priority. We need to continue raising it by, among others, implementing the replanting program for smallholders’ plantations, which has been supported by the oil palm plantation fund management board (BPDPKS) since 2016,” he asserted. (*)

Source: InfoSAWIT