Government asks for acceleration of palm oil rejuvenation

"The increase of people's plantation productivity becomes priority, and the funding support from BPDP needs to be increased for the acceleration of rejuvenation," Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman uttered in Nusa Dua, Bali, on Wednesday.

In 2016, BPDP-KS allocated a rejuvenation funding for 100,000 hectares of farmers' land. However, the absorption for the rejuvenation is still considered low because it is constrained by legality of land that is difficult to be fulfilled by people's farmers.

The constraint is caused by the requirement set by BPDP-KS that the people's farmers who receive the oil-palm rejuvenation funding assistance should form a farmers group in order for the rejuvenation process to be more efficient. Moreover, farmers also need to establish a cooperative, and have a legal land title certificate and have the potential to obtain the Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil System (ISPO) certificate.

The obstacle in increasing the productivity of people's plantation, Amran said, based on the Minister of Environment and Forestry, is due to overlapping with forest areas. The problem needs to be solved in order to provide legal certainty and acceptability by bank loans.

"Meanwhile, for the oil-palm plantation in peatland, the implementation of sustainable peat management needs to be enhanced with the objective to increase productivity and prevent land fires," Amran said.

In addition, the government considered that the oil palm rejuvenation program can be carried out by integrating land either owned by farmers or company. The integration program takes form of oil-palm plantation integration with cow breeding and still using funding from BPDP-KS.

It was recorded that during the period of January to August 2016, BPDP-KS had collected funds of Rp7.19 trillion from oil-palm export levy collection. While in July to December 2015, the collected funds amounted to Rp6.9 trillion, so that the total collected funds reached Rp14.1 trillion since the establishment of the agency in July 2015.

BPDP-KS has channeled 71 percent of the total obtained funds for biodiesel subsidy program. Until June 2016, the total subsidy for biodiesel reached Rp6.52 trillion, so that the majority of funds released by BPDP-KS were for biodiesel subsidy and not for plant rejuvenation.

In the period of July to December 2015, from the total amount of collected funds of Rp6.9 billion, the majority was used to pay for the biodiesel price difference subsidy. It was recorded that the biodiesel subsidy payment reached Rp467.21, research of Rp10.25 billion, and for the rejuvenation of only Rp623.5 million.