Jakarta – A third day of rioting over soaring prices of fertilizers has left scores of shops vandalized and looted, three people wounded and 13 others arrested in the Indonesian city of Blora, reports said here Friday.

"We were forced to act firmly and shoot three shop looters. Three warning shots were ignored and the security personnel were forced to immobilize them," the Central Java police chief Major General Nurfaizi said according to the Jawa Pos daily.

Farmers angered by high prices of fertilizers have been attacking warehouses and shops in the central Java district of Blora since late on Saturday and the violence continued on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Suara Karya daily said.

Nurfaizi said three people were shot in the legs, and after treatment at a local hospital, were now detained along with 10 others at the Blora district police station, Jawa Pos said.

"After questioning, eight of them are suspected of instigating the violence while the rest were just following what the mob was doing, " he said.

"It has been under control since yesterday (Thursday) but it is not quite calm yet," an officer at the detective unit at the district police post in Blora said by telephone Friday. But the officer declined to comment on the damage, casualties or arrests refering to the head of the district police.

On Wednesday mobs of more than 1,000 farmers looted most shops in Todanan sub-district some 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of Blora, the Suara Karya daily said. They looted the shops, taking away stocks of fertilizers as well as food and other goods.

The violence in the region followed a scarcity in fertilisers at the start of the planting season. Availabale fertilisers, including those bought at subsidized prices, were sold at high prices by private sellers, sparking the anger of the local population.

The government last week lifted price subsidies on fertilizers, saying that the subsidies were not effective as most of the fertilizers went to large plantation companies and not the targetted small scale rice farmers.

To offset the rise in prices, the government upped the rice floor price but the Business News bi-weekly magazine said the farmers were caught because they were being asked to pay the higher fertilizer prices before they could benefit from higher paddy prices. "Without fertilizers, their harvest will definitely fail and the living conditions of farmers, now already impoverished, will be further worsening," the Business News said.

Central Java authorites have now put the priority on fertilizer supply to Blora, to prevent the unrest from spreading further, the Kompas daily said without elaborating.