Here's Bulog's Efforts To Press Expensive And Rare Rice Prices

JAKARTA - Rice prices continue to skyrocket. At the same time premium rice is rare in a number of markets. General Manager of the Bulog Business Unit of the Niaga Center, Topan Ruspayandi, said that his party had made a number of efforts to overcome this.

He admitted that related to domestic food management, it cannot only be based on the assignments given by the government. Therefore, his party will encourage subsidiaries belonging to State-Owned Enterprises (BUMN) to increase domestic rice production.

"In terms of business approach, how, for example, BUMN or the private sector encourages food agriculture or enabling environment. How farmers become something interesting and do eventually fulfill the lives of their own farmers. In the future, maybe Bulog will enter there more," said Topan in a discussion forum entitled "The Arrah of Indonesian Food Policy after the 2024 General Election" in Jakarta, quoted on Saturday, February 10.

Topan said that in order to control the price of rice, his party had distributed 300,000 tons of premium rice. However, Topan assessed that the figure was only 1 percent of the total rice market.

Not only that, but his party has also built 10 rice milling centers, seven (7) rice processing centers, to logistics.

He added that the government through the National Food Agency (Bapanas) has allowed as much as 200,000 tons of Government Rice Reserve rice (CBP) to be managed by Bulog into premium rice.

"We see that there is instability outside. The government hopes that this transfer of rice can also control the medium and premium ones. We will see in the future. Hopefully the program can run effectively in controlling prices because it is just running," he said.

As previously reported, the Indonesian Retail Entrepreneurs Association (Aprindo) has requested the government's consideration to relax the Highest Retail Price (HET) and reference prices for several food commodities that have the potential to increase in February 2024. The commodities in question include rice, sugar, cooking oil and so on.

Chairman of Aprindo Roy N Mandey revealed that the request for relaxation of HET was addressed at a certain/temporary time or as long as it was still being studied and there was no decision to make changes to the HET & Reference Price through the Coordination Meeting.

"In order to prevent vacancies or scarcity (scarcity) of these important basic commodities in modern retail outlets in Indonesia, where scarcity occurs, it will lead to panic buying consumers, who will compete to buy and even store essential staples because they are worried that goods will run out and the price situation will not be stable," Roy said in a written statement, Friday, February 9.

Roy assessed that the HET relaxation aims so that retailers can buy these food commodities from producers who have raised the purchase price above HET over the past week by 20-35 percent from the previous price.