JAKARTA, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian President Joko Widodo pledged commitments on Wednesday to allocate more fund in addressing food resilience issue among the people, highly expected to further boost crops that would eventually increase national food production.
The president said those commitments would be coupled close monitoring to assure correct use of the funds to finance people in rural areas in increasing their food production.
"I would control the use of rural funds, assuring it is used by those directly involved in food production," the president said in his remarks in a session held in the presidential palace to award 73 farmers with remarkable records to address food resilience.
The funds can be used to finance irrigation construction and water reservoir projects so as to increase food production, the president added.
To facilitate efforts in bolstering food resilience in rural areas, the president said that his government would increase fund allocation for this next year and the following year.
"The allocation for next year has been allocated at 60 trillion rupiah (about 4.4 billion U.S. Dollars), higher than 47 trillion rupiah (about 3.4 billion U.S. Dollars) this year. In 2018, I am looking for an allocation of 120 trillion rupiah (about 8.8 billion U.S. Dollars), I have discussed it with the related ministers," the president said.
He added that all of those efforts are expected to help the nation in achieving self-supplied regime in food sector, reducing food imports.
Indonesia has seen improving performance in agriculture sector in the past year.
Farmers' satisfactory rate over government's last year efforts to develop the sector stands at 76.80 percent, according to results of a survey carried out by Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF) this year.
According to results of a survey carried out by Britain-based The Economist Intelligence Unit, the rank of Indonesia's Global Food Security Index (GFSI) has increased to 71 this year from the previous 74 of 113 countries and regions surveyed by the agency.
