Jabat Menko Pangan, Zulhas Kejar Swasembada Pangan Dalam 5 Tahun

Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs (Menko Pangan) Zulkifli Hasan. (Photo: Mery Handayani/VOI)

JAKARTA - Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs (Menko Pangan) Zulkifli Hasan admitted that he had received a big task from President Prabowo Subianto. This task is to pursue Indonesia's self-sufficiency in food in five years.

The man who is familiarly called Zulhas revealed that food production will not be able to surplus if agricultural land is still limited. However, he continued, to expand agricultural land, Java Island is not the solution.

Furthermore, Zulhas said, the way to accelerate food self-sufficiency prepared by his party was to utilize land outside Java.

"Indeed, the future for planting rice, sugar and corn is in Papua. We have a very broad Papua but not optimized," he said at the Ministry of Trade Office, Jakarta, Monday, October 21.

Furthermore, Zulhas admitted that the target of self-sufficiency in food had actually been raised 10 years ago, in 2014. Now the goal was again made to Prabowo three months ago.

"I submitted this proposal 10 years ago when we first supported Pak Prabowo in 2014, our proposal at that time was self-sufficiency in food by dividing agricultural clusters," said Zulhas.

Pursuit Two Million Hectares Of Land

In addition, Zulhas said the government would also pursue the target of 2 million hectares (ha) of agricultural land for rice commodities in Papua. This includes the expansion of agricultural land for other agricultural commodities.

"The 600,000 hectare sugar cane plantation is up to 1 million hectares, so our future there is rice farming, sugar cane, corn is in Papua," he said.

According to Zulhas, food self-sufficiency is also important to encourage the Indonesian economy to advance to become a developed country.

He said Indonesia's challenge with other countries in ASEAN was to reduce large per capita growth.

Even though it's next to (Malaysia), already 12,000 GDP per capita. We haven't arrived yet. Thailand has almost 8,000. We have more than half of it. Therefore, Pak Prabowo invites us to come together. You can go anywhere, from any party, but unite," he explained.