Indonesia to reduce corn, salt, sugar imports in 2025

Indonesia will slash corn, salt, sugar import quotas for 2025 as part of its efforts to make domestic industries use more domestic products.

Indonesian Coordinating Food Minister Zulkifli Hasan on Tuesday said that the import quotas for 2025 for these three commodities will be significantly lower than the projected demand of local industries.

In 2024, the country's estimated industrial corn demand is about 1.6-1.7 million tons, but the import quota for corn next year is only 900,000 tons. This forces Indonesia to improve the quality of corn production to serve domestic industries.

According to the minister, Indonesia will continue to import industrial salt for the next two years, but with reduced quotas.

The import quota for industrial salt for the chlor-alkali industry will be 1.7 million tons in 2025, which is 68% of the projected demand of 2.5 million tons. Indonesia aims to produce enough industrial salt domestically to meet demand in two years.

For industrial sugar, the Indonesian government has set an import quota of 3.45 million tons, lower than the average import level of 5-6 million tons per year in previous years.

The Ministry of Industry said that in 2024, the industrial demand for imported raw sugar is expected to reach 4.77 million tons, of which 3.46 million tons will be processed into refined sugar domestically.

Data from the Statistics Indonesia (BPS) for this year show that the country has had to import a large quantity of staple food items, including rice, sugar, soybean, and corn.

Specifically, the rice import amounts to 3.23 million tons, followed by sugar at 3.66 million tons, soybean at 2.16 million tons, and corn at 970,000 tons.

Compared to the import volumes in the first nine months of 2023, rice import surged by 80.68%, soybean by 15.64%, and corn by 44.97%, indicating that the country continues to rely on the import of these items to meet domestic demand.