DEPUTY Minister of Agriculture (Wamentan) Sudaryono invited farmers in Deli Serdang Regency, North Sumatra Province (Sumut), to optimize existing idle land into productive land to strengthen Indonesia’s food supply, especially in the midst of a global food emergency.
“We are all required to change idle land into productive land. If there is productive land in North Sumatra, there is empty land, idle land, maybe because of lack of water and so on, immediately report it to the Head of the Service. Later the Ministry of Agriculture will carry out treatment-treatment“Whether it is pumping so that the land is wet and can then be planted with food crops and others,” said the Deputy Minister of Agriculture when planting chilies and onions in Sena Village, Batang Kuis District, Deli Serdang Regency, North Sumatra, Sunday (11/8).
According to him, the potential of idle land in Deli Serdang is still very open and can produce very large food sufficiency. Moreover, Indonesia in the next few months will still have to face a long drought due to the worst El Nino in history.
Therefore, the government through the Ministry of Agriculture has made a number of efforts to secure food availability through the planting area addition program (PAT) by maximizing pumping. North Sumatra currently has a PAT target of 97 thousand hectares and to date 58 thousand hectares have been realized.
“This is what we want push again until September as much as possible the 97 thousand will be finished. So we already have the points. We are coordinating and are being assisted by the Agriculture Service in the City Regency, the Provincial Agriculture Service, and also support the maximum from the Indonesian National Army,” he said.
Previously, the Ministry of Agriculture and the TNI had signed a cooperation agreement or MoU to increase production and restore food self-sufficiency as achieved three years ago to strengthen agriculture in facing the threat of the impact of El Nino.
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Regarding this, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture reminded farmer groups who had received pump assistance to use it as soon as possible to catch up on the planting season by utilizing existing water sources.
“In agriculture, time is an important component, fertilizer must be on time, planting must be on time, water must be on time. The plants scheduling-it’s clear. When you need fertilizer, there must be fertilizer. When planting, there must be water. If there is no water, you can’t plant,” he explained.
In addition, Sudaryono also took the time to review the PAT/Pompanisasi location in Kolam Village, Percut Sei Tuan District. On this occasion, he said that the 65 dams built by President Joko Widodo could be utilized optimally up to tertiary irrigation to enter the rice fields.
“Not only pumps, but also damaged irrigation that we repair. What is not there, we add. Currently, only 20 percent of the land from 7.4 million is affected by irrigation. We want to increase it from 20% to 50%. This means, from the previous 1.5 million that was affected by irrigation, we want to increase it by adding another 2.1 million-2.2 million. So that the total can be almost 4 million hectares that can be irrigated, harvested 3 times. So we hope that later food self-sufficiency, in this case rice, can really be achieved soon,” he explained. (Fal/E-2)
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