Minister Teten Alludes Moneylender Business Which Often Claim As Cooperation, This Is What He Said

Minister of Cooperation and SMEs Teten Masduki (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - Minister of Cooperation and SMEs Teten Masduki said that in the community, the image of cooperatives is often equated with moneylenders who provide financial services with very high repayment obligations.

This is due to public ignorance of the actual information about cooperatives. In addition, the penetration of moneylenders who enter the micro sector is one of the factors that supports this paradigm.

To that end, he seeks to show the new face of Indonesian cooperatives with a number of strategic steps.

"In the community below, cooperatives are also known as moneylenders who work with the label of cooperatives, so we continue to do rebranding of cooperatives as modern, contributive, competitive business partners with various development strategies," he said at the launch of Bung Hatta's Thought Book which was held online, Monday, July 12.

According to Teten, his party is now trying to realize the cooperation plan between cooperatives and larger business entities. This strategy is intended to be able to increase the economies of scale of cooperatives to be more sustainable and have more resilience.

"One of them is through the corporatization of food," he said.

Teten admitted that this was a direct instruction from the head of state.

"Incidentally, I got an assignment from the President to be able to create a more advanced and independent Indonesian cooperative," he said.

Meanwhile, the background of food corporatization that he is now intensifying is to embrace all small farmers and individuals who are widely spread in a number of areas, especially in Java. The reason is that micro-patterned agricultural businesses are considered unable to make a maximum contribution to the economy.

“We have food problems from time to time that have not been resolved. I think that with the large number of individual smallholders who have not yet united, the goal of food security will be difficult to realize. This is the importance of cooperatives holding all of them and then integrating them with large corporate businesses,” he explained.

Furthermore, Teten said that corporatization allows cooperatives to get maximum access to financing from large financial institutions.

"This consolidation is important not only for cooperatives but also for members to be able to connect with established financial institutions such as banks so that their economic activities can be further improved," concluded Teten.