RI Discusses Strengthening Regional Rice Reserve Systems In Apterr

Illustration (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - Indonesia through the National Food Agency discussed strengthening the regional rice reserve management system as an effort to anticipate the impact of climate change and natural disaster management in the Asian region at the ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve (Apterr) forum which was held in Seoul, South Korea.

"According to President Joko Widodo's direction, efforts to strengthen food and nutrition security need to be built together with friendly countries to maintain regional food security stability," said Bapanas Director of Distribution and Reserves Rachmi Widiriani as quoted by Antara, Sunday, April 30.

At the forum, Rachmi emphasized that Apterr's important role in ensuring regional food security was especially during emergency situations such as natural disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and so on.

The strengthening of regional food security, he said, is in line with Indonesia's initiative as the chairman of The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 2023 as outlined in the ASEAN Leaders Declaration on Holding Food Security and Nutrition in the Times of Crisis.

According to him, Apterr can play a role as a buffer for food security in ASEAN and East Asia, including in facilitating trade, ensuring smooth logistics and supply chains, as well as accelerating food and agricultural delivery from upstream to downstream.

To strengthen long-term food security, ASEAN will develop strong food and agriculture through promotion of digitalization, innovative financing, climate security, and capacity building of small-scale farmers.

Furthermore, Indonesia also encourages the development of an early warning system to predict the conditions of regional food security that will come.

This system does not only focus on the aspect of food production, but also takes into account the volatility of food prices, agricultural input supply, food consumption situations, to other factors.

This early warning system is expected to support the implementation of Apterr so that it can also increase effectiveness and accelerate the release of Apterr rice reserves.

"The development of this early warning system can be carried out through the ASEAN Food Security Information System (AFSIS)," he said.

Apterr is a working group under the framework of ASEAN and three partner countries (Japan, South Korea, and China) that focus on developing food reserves in order to strengthen regional food security.

Apterr's main goal is to strengthen food security, poverty alleviation, and malnutrition for its members without distorting normal trade, while Apterr's joint goal is guaranteed food security in the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) area.