JAKARTA: Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman has said, this year Indonesia has exported 35,000 tonnes of onions. “Formerly, we planned to import onions, but in fact we have just exported 35,000 tonnes of onions,” the minister said before officials of the Agriculture Ministry on Saturday night (Oct. 24).
Apart from exporting onions, Indonesia has also exported green beans, and corn, Minister Sulaiman said without mentioning the volume and value of green beans and the corn. According to Sulaiman, so far a lot of news coverage merely reported about food imports, while exports of some commodities even hardly ever exposed.
“It’s been 365 days or one year of President Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla (Jokowi-JK) governance, but the country has yet imported rice. Our rice production is the highest in the last ten years,” the minister explained.
According to Sulaiman, many export achievements of a number of agricultural commodities rarely published. “It should be noted that this is a remarkable achievement, as we have not opened the opportunity of rice import. Because the imports only make farmers of Vietnam and Thailand prosperous,” the minister added.
