President Jokowi: Domestic Market Must Be Protected

President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) gave a speech at the opening of the 39th Trade Expo Indonesia in 2024 at ICE BSD, Tangerang Regency, Banten/ANTARA

BANTEN - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) reminded that Indonesia as a country with a large market and with the 4th largest population in the world, namely 280 million people must be able to protect the domestic market and must also be able to market national products.

"So that we can control the domestic market and also continue to expand widely in foreign markets," said Jokowi in his remarks at the opening of the 39th Trade Expo Indonesia 2024 at ICE BSD, Tangerang Regency, Banten, Antara, Wednesday, October 9.

The reason, said Jokowi, is that many countries are currently starting to worry about overproduction in China.

"There has been a lot of widespread discussion about overproduction in China, many countries have started to worry and are preparing to protect their domestic market from the massive entry of imported products from China at a much cheaper price," he said.

For this reason, the President requested that domestic product marketing not be carried out in a conventional way because it is currently in the digital era.

"Improvement should also not always be conventional, now it is in a digital era. We must enter massively in that direction to market our country's products. When many countries carry out restrictions due to trade wars, I think there is an opportunity. When many countries experience high inflation, I think there is also an opportunity," he said.

Furthermore, Jokowi said, currently the world is still not recovering, the global economy is still growing slowly in the range of 2.6-2.7 percent. Inflation, he said, also still haunts many countries.

"The global inflation forecast is in the range of 5.9 percent," said the President.

Furthermore, the Head of State also conveyed that conventional wars and trade wars are still ongoing which makes countries carry out trade restrictive policies.

"Currently, there are at least 19 countries that do it, all of which make global trade volume sluggish," he said.

For this reason, he welcomed the implementation of the 39th Trade Expo Indonesia as the largest export product exhibition in Indonesia which was carried out in a hybrid by offline and virtual manner to market superior domestic products to the world market.

"We must be able to take advantage of this momentum to encourage even higher export growth and to improve the quality and competitiveness of our products and be able to penetrate into a wider market," he said.

"By saying Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, I declare that the 39th Trade Expo Indonesia is open this morning," said the President ending his remarks.