Agriculture miniater Calls For Increased Food Diversification

Malang, East Java, Feb 3 (Antara) - Agriculture minister Suswono has once again called on the government and the people to continue intensifying efforts in food diversification to assure future food sustainability in the country. "Indeed, the most practical and affordable food now is rice. But starting now, we must intensify diversification efforts because our agricultural land has been depleting," he stated here on Monday, after opening a working meeting at the National Farmers and Fishermen Week. The minister emphasized that food must be diversified from rice to other alternate commodities such as cassava and sago flour, although currently, the price of sago flour is even higher than the price of rice. Suswono expressed concern that people in Papua or East Nusa Tenggara, who are used to eating tubers and sago, have also now turned to rice, resulting in a lot of land in the provinces being converted into rice fields. He added that farmers must start intensifying food crops like cassava as it could be processed into mocaf flour in place of wheat flour. He explained that the diversification need is quite urgent more so now, when imports of wheat have reached seven million tons a year, creating a problem following the implementation of value added tax for wheat flour produced by industries. The minister added that if mocaf flour from cassava processing could be mass-produced, it could minimally substitute wheat flour by up to 20 percent. Regarding depleting agricultural land in the country, Suswono stated that it must be stopped. "It must even be extended to outside of Java," he added. The per capita ownership of agricultural land in Indonesia at present is only 0.3 hectares on an average, as compared to 3 hectares in Thailand where productivity is also higher, he pointed out. "Experts here must be able to find a formula to increase productivity so that in the future people will not suffer food shortages, besides large-scale diversification efforts," he explained. "Smart rice," which is made of cassava, has been introduced as an alternative source of food to replace rice in Malang. The district is now able to produce cassava up to 740 thousand tons a year and mocaf up to 290 thousand tons.