Indonesia sees 2010 rice surplus at 5 million tons
JAKARTA (Commodity Online) : After increasing paddy field areas, Indonesia said the country expected to see a rice surplus of 5 million tons at the end of this year.
In a statement, Indonesia’s agriculture ministry said the increased output is the result of the realization of rice fields covering 12.257 million hectares in July.
“In the next two months, the area of paddy field is still going to increase,” the statement added.
Assuming that water supply during the wet dry season was enough the government believed the target of planting rice on 664 thousand hectares in August and 526 hectares in September could be achieved, it said.
The figures would bring the total area of rice fields this year to 13.45 million hectares with the area of rice harvests projected at 13.08 million hectares, the statement added.
If the average productivity of rice field reached 5.132 tons per hectare, rice production would reach 67.15 million tons of dry unhusked rice, a 3.08 percent increase compared to last year.
The increase was far higher than the rice consumption growth target of 1.34 percent for 2010.