Pupuk Indonesia allocates Rp116 rillion for a factory in Fakfak Regency

PT Pupuk Indonesia (Persero) President Director Rahmad Pribadi stated that has allocated Rp116 trillion of funds to raise its production capacity by constructing a new factory in Fakfak Regency, West Papua Province.

"Insha Allah, it will increase our production capacity," he said in an official statement on Feb. 21, 2025.

Rahmad explained increasing production capacity is crucial since President Prabowo Subianto has the ambition of realizing his food self-sufficiency program in the next five years. Fertilizer, he said, is one of the instruments that cannot be separated from efforts to increase food production as it contributed to 62 percent of Indonesian agricultural productivity.

"Therefore, achieving food self-sufficiency will be very difficult to achieve without sufficient fertilizer availability," he noted.

Rahmad said that Indonesia once achieved a measure of food self-sufficiency, especially for rice, in 1984. The achievement, he claimed, was inseparable from the development of the fertilizer industry from PT Pupuk Sriwidjaja Palembang (Pusri) in 1959 to PT Pabrik Iskandar Muda (PIM) in 1982.

"Indonesia is a real example of a country that has achieved food self-sufficiency because it focuses on developing its fertilizer industry," he said.

Since then, Rahmad said, there has never been any new development of local food self-sufficiency. He predicted that the annual national demand for rice will increase to 37 tons by 2045 based on Indonesia's population being forecasted to reach 324 million people in 2045.

"So it's (fertilizer industry development for food self-sufficiency) super significant," he said.

In addition to ensuring the availability of fertilizer, Rahmad said that Pupuk Indonesia will also optimize the distribution and redemption of fertilizer digitally to ensure that the fertilizer produced by the state-owned enterprise (SOE) can reach farmers properly and transparently.

"We have implemented end-to-end digitalization from the production process until it is redeemed by farmers at kiosks using a system called i-Pubers," he divulged.

The application allows Pupuk Indonesia to monitor every part of the fertilizer distribution process and ensure the accuracy and efficiency of its distribution.

"Through this digitalization, we can see every grain of fertilizer loaded on the ship," said Rahmad, "The movement of the ship can also be monitored via GPS, then there is CCTV [monitoring when the fertilizer] enters the warehouse, and it is also [monitored by] GPS [when the fertilizer is] being carried by trucks to farmers."