Will Give Subsidies Again, Airlangga: There Are Various Techniques

Coordinating Minister for the Economy Airlangga Hartarto (Photo: Aris Nurjani/VOI)

JAKARTA - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) will again provide additional fertilizer subsidies for the community in 2024. Previously, the government would also provide Direct Cash Assistance of IDR 600,000 for the community to mitigate food risk.

Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto said there are various techniques and ways to add funding sources for the allocation of aid, one of which is for fertilizer subsidies, the government does not rule out the possibility of implementing an automatic adjustment scheme.

"Later on, there will be various techniques. The Minister of Finance (Sri Mulyani) will complete one of them is automatic adjustment," he told the media crew, Monday, February 5, 2024.

For information, the automatic adjustment policy is a temporary backup of Ministry/Institution (K/L) expenditures which are temporarily blocked at the 2023 budget year K/L Expenditure Ceiling of 5 percent to deal with global economic uncertainty and geopolitical turmoil.

Previously, the Government would again carry out automatic adjustments or blocking a number of expenditure budgets in ministries/agencies that were not priority to priority amounting to IDR 50.14 trillion in the budget ceiling for the 2024 fiscal year.

The policy is contained in the Letter of the Minister of Finance Number S-182/MK.02/2023 concerning the Automatic Adjustment of Ministry Expenditures/Institutions for the 2024 fiscal year.

Airlangga emphasized that fertilizer subsidies are important because Indonesia has entered the planting season so that the government will increase the fertilizer subsidy budget by Rp. 14 trillion or the equivalent of 2.5 million tons of subsidized fertilizer.

"The fertilizer subsidy should not be late, so the president has agreed to agree to add a subsidy of Rp. 14 trillion," he explained.

Previously, the number of farmers who received subsidized fertilizer allocations in 2024 was 14.3 million farmers with subsidized fertilizer allocations of 5.2 million tons.

In order to overcome the shortage of subsidized fertilizers, President Joko Widodo on January 2, 2024 has also given directions to increase the budget of IDR 14 trillion or 2.5 million tons of subsidized fertilizer.