Jakarta – The Indonesian government plans to develop two million hectares of new paddy fields outside Java to secure rice supplies for the nation's growing population.
Mr Atos Suprapto, the director-general for facilities and infrastructure at the Agriculture Ministry, said the ambitious project would be completed next year and would focus on the provinces of South Sumatra, Jambi, Riau, Bengkulu and West Kalimantan.
"Opening new areas and maintaining the present agricultural areas are important programmes at this moment," Mr Atos was quoted as saying by the Antara news agency. He cited data from the Central Statistics Office which revealed that one million hectares of paddy fields had been converted into non-agricultural areas from 1983 to 1993.
According to Mr Atos, the Japan Investment Cooperation Agency said an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 hectares of agricultural lands in Java had been converted into housing and industrial projects.
Without new paddy fields, he warned, the country's rice production would not be able to satisfy the growing demand from the nation's 210 million people.
Indonesia's annual rice consumption was 135 kilograms per capita, he said. "If domestic rice production fails to meet the population's demand, we may be in danger of becoming the world's largest rice importer," he said. Indonesia imported 3.5 million tonnes of rice – or 10 per cent of the domestic demand – from India, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar last year.
Mr Atos said the Agriculture Ministry would work together with the Ministry of Settlement and Regional Development and the Ministry of Transmigration and Population to implement the paddy fields project.
Financing was expected from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and donor countries, he said. China was expected to provide modern technology for the project.
However, Mr Atos refused to specify the amount of investment needed for the project, saying his ministry was still calculating the cost. "For sure, we will have concrete details of the project by December 2000, and we will issue a joint ministerial decree," he said, referring to the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Settlement and Regional Development and the Minister of Transmigration and Population.
Former president Suharto initiated a similarly ambitious project in Central Kalimantan after the country lost its self-sufficiency in rice production in the early 1990s.
Known as the "one-million-hectare peat land project", the 1996 proposal came to a sorry end as the land was found to be unsuitable for rice cultivation. Some 63,000 farmers from outside the province had migrated to the area.