JAKARTA, Jan 21 (The Straits Times/ANN): Indonesia is reintroducing the farming of sorghum, a popular staple food in the old days, as it seeks to expand its staple food sources beyond rice and wheat.
The rice-eating country is aiming to have 30,000ha of sorghum plantations by end-2023, and 40,000ha by 2024, from less than 10,000ha today.
The increased sorghum acreage will still be dwarfed by the 7.5 million ha of rice fields across the world’s largest archipelagic nation, underscoring the importance of rice to the Indonesians.
Still, there are compelling reasons for the government to promote the growing and consumption of sorghum in the country as it looks for alternatives to rice and wheat to feed its burgeoning population that now stands at 270 million.
First off, sorghum has several advantages over rice.
Unlike rice, which needs a lot of water, sorghum is able to thrive in dry conditions.
It has more nutritional value, containing not only carbohydrates, but also protein, minerals, potassium, calcium and phosphorus. Rice has only carbohydrates and some protein and is high in glucose.
Sorghum is also not new to Indonesians and should be easily accepted by them as a staple food, although only about 5 per cent of the adult population today know about sorghum, let alone consume it, according to emergent sorghum businessman Novan Satrianto.
The cereal has been known and possibly grown and consumed in Indonesia since ancient times. It is depicted on relics of the world’s largest Buddhist temple Borobudur in Central Java, whose construction started in AD750.
Sorghum was widely cultivated in the 1970s and consumed in East Nusa Tenggara, which receives low rainfall, as well as some other provinces. But it was overtaken by rice in these places over the next three decades as the Suharto administration promoted the crop as a staple food.
The Indonesian government is now deploying free sorghum seeds and fertilisers to targeted provinces – East Nusa Tenggara, Central Sulawesi, West Kalimantan, West Java, Banten and East Java, said Dr Ismail Wahab, the Agriculture Ministry’s director for cereal.
“We continue to do required work and will further expand the coverage,” he told The Straits Times, noting that new sorghum plantations will not affect existing food crops and that they could also be on marginalised land.
But most importantly, when ground into flour, sorghum can be a reliable substitute for wheat flour.
The popularity of wheat-based products, such as noodles, pasta and bread, is on the rise, thanks to the changing eating habits of Indonesia’s emerging middle class.
But as a tropical country, it cannot grow wheat, and imports more than 10 million tonnes of it annually.
As a wheat importer, it is subject to the vagaries of external events – the war in Ukraine, a major wheat exporter, has disrupted supplies, while India and Kazakhstan have halted wheat exports to meet their domestic needs.
In August 2022, President Joko Widodo ordered his ministers to draw up a road map for sorghum through 2024.
“If we could have an annual output of one million tonnes of sorghum five years from now, that would be a good achievement,” Batara Siagian, director for processing and marketing of food crops at the Agriculture Ministry, told The Straits Times.
About 30,000ha of land could yield about 120,000 tonnes of sorghum, he noted.
The government is also coming up with plans to encourage the downstream development of sorghum, such as flour and bioethanol, so there would be enough demand to absorb the growing output, he said.
Novan, the founder and director of Sedana Panen Sejahtera, a company that operates sorghum plantations in East Java and processes the yields into sugar, rice-like grains, flour and sauce, is optimistic that one day, sorghum would overtake wheat flour in Indonesia.
This will happen when the downstream industry has developed and become efficient, and the nation’s output has reached economies of scale, he said.
He pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic has raised the health consciousness of Indonesians so that sorghum has become more attractive because of its rich nutrients.
However, there are more than 20 variants of sorghum with different grain sizes, and the equipment used to process one variant may not be suitable for use for another variant. Factories have to modify their equipment every time they receive from farmers a different sorghum variant.
Novan suggested that the government pick one or two prime variants of sorghum and declare them as the nation’s standard variants so that the industry can use standard equipment.
Another advantage of sorghum is that it has other uses besides being a food. The central portion of sorghum stalks is juicy and sweet and can be processed into bioethanol, a form of renewable energy.
Novan’s six-year-old company is in talks with a Japanese investor for a possible bioethanol project.
“My company tried doing bioethanol but it did not make sense because the market price then would not cover the costs. Now, with the energy crunch, it has started to make sense,” he said. - The Straits Times/ANN
