Farmers Suffer Rp750 Billion Losses Due To Flooding
Friday, 05 January, 2007 | 13:03 WIB

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: The Agriculture Department said that farmers’ losses due to flooding in 2006 totalled Rp750 billion. This does not include losses due to drought which is estimated to be much higher than that of the flooding effect.

Director General of Food at the Agriculture Department, Sutarto Alimoeso, said this amount of damage resulted from the calculation of rice fields undergoing harvest failure and production decreasing due to floods. “But this is a rough calculation,” Sutarto told Tempo in Jakarta yesterday (4/1).

The Agriculture Department noted that the area of rice fields that were flooded during 2006 reached 312,000 hectares. Out of that number, 125,000 hectares were harvest failures. Floods forced farmers to repeat the sowing process. “Or else, the farmers’ productivity will regress,” he said.

However, the sowing process costs around Rp500,000 per hectare. This means, the funds needed to re-sow the 125,000 hectares of rice fields that have had harvest failure reach Rp62.5 billion. These losses are not yet added to the productivity decrease of rice fields being flooded.

If rice field’s drop one ton per hectare, the loss of flooded rice fields of 312,000 hectares reaches more than Rp600 billion. “So, if these are added up, the amount of farmers’ losses can reach Rp750 billion,” said Sutarto.

According to him, the worst flood occurred between January and February 2006. During the two months, rice fields that were flooded totalled 184,000 hectares . Out of that number 63,000 hectares had harvest failure. This loss increases with rice fields having harvest failure due to drought.

This number resulted between the rice lost due to floods and drought which reaches 624,000 tons and the government’s purchase price for ground dried unhusked rice of Rp2,280 per kilogram.

According to an agriculture observer, Chudori, the number of losses is still small. He predicts that the Agriculture Department did not calculate the losses of the cost for field leasing; payment for field workers and loss of seeds . The losses may have been more than Rp1 million per hectare, so it is estimated that the farmers’ losses are higher than Rp750 billion.

Ewo Raswa