Livestock Feed Ingredients Still Imported

JAKARTA – Until now, national poultry feed ingredients such as corn and soybean is still dependant on import. The problem is supplies for these ingredients are still limited. On the other hand, there is no partnership between feed producers and local suppliers.
Director of Non-ruminant Culture of the Ministry of Agriculture, Djajadi Gunawan, said that corn importation for feed reaches up to 51 percent of the total demand. “Even soybean is still 100 percent imported,” he said in Jakarta, last Wednesday.
Aside from the limitations of local supplies, Djajadi said that importation of these ingredients could not be avoided because of imported livestock, particularly poultry, which feed needs to be adjusted with ingredients from their original country.

In 2007, Indonesia still imports 0.4 million tons of corn for feed. But this figure is already a decrease from the importation in 2006 which reaches 1.9 tons of corn with a value of 380 billion rupiahs. Currently our national feed demand is approximately 7 million tons per year.
Djajadi also said that Indonesia has 55 feed mill companies with a capacity of 11 million tons a year. “So, from the production side, we can fulfill our own national feed demands,” he said. Those companies are spread in North Sumatra, Lampung, Banten, Jakarta, West Java, Central Java, East Java, and South Sulawesi.
Meanwhile, our current national poultry population is 1.5 billion birds which 1.1 million of them are broiler chickens. To reduce dependency on imported ingredients, Djajadi recommended producers to be creative, such as using residues of oil palms as corn substitutes.
“Substitution could reach up to 30 percent,” he said. He added that the palm oil industry has about 50 derivates of processed products, including feed. “This residue of oil palms could be a source of additional income besides its main product, palm oil,” he said. Gabriel Wahyu Titiyoga
Source : Tempo