Tropical Fruit Development in Indonesia

The successful development of a sector of the food industry will normally be related to a number of factors. It will involve an appropriate climate, reasonable infrastructure and access to distribution, availability of capital, and reasonable government policies, as well as some other variables. In Southeast Asia, both the Philippines and Thailand have developed very successful export tropical fruit industries, while their much larger neighbor, Indonesia, has been notoriously unsuccessful in this field.
        
The U.S. Agency for International Development recently initiated a three year program in Indonesia, AMARTA, designed to assist Indonesian agriculture, and one of the principal programs of AMARTA is focused in the area of tropical fruit. Novelle principal, Henry Winogrond, was asked to come to Indonesia to do an assessment of the state of the industry, and to recommend to USAID and AMARTA where their efforts should be focused over the course of the following three years.
        
Mr. Winogrond has worked in Indonesia many times before this recent visit, and quickly concluded that it not be a proper allocation of time or money to focus on the large northern islands, Kalimantan and Sulawesi, nor the many islands to the east of Bali. The populations are low and the infrastructure nearly non-existent, making the relationship between the efforts required and the expected benefits a poor one. They focus should instead be on the axis from Bali, through Java, and then east Sumatra, as well as an area of north Sumatra around the port city of Medan. This is an area with a population of 150,000,000–160,000,000 people, and a reasonable infrastructure that offers the possibility of both domestic and export economic distribution.
        
Secondly, it was determined that the project should be market driven, and Mr. Winogrond began by interviewing the largest domestic fruit distributors and fruit exporters. From them was learned the products and the growing areas in the country with the most potential.
        
The next few weeks were then spent traveling the country and interviewing producers within the targeted market area. This included citrus, mango, mangosteen, and cut flower growers in Bali. Banana and mango producer groups were visited in east Java. Pineapple, mangosteen, and mango areas were analyzed in west Java, as well as pineapples and bananas in west Sumatra. Finally, banana, pineapple, citrus, and cut flower growers were interviewed in the fertile areas of north Sumatra.

Many projects were found that offered significant returns for immediate modest levels of support. The normal forms of assistance delivered by USAID are technical production assistance, postharvest assistance, refrigeration and packing plat design work, and organizational assistance of all kinds. The immediate projects that will be undertaken will be with banana growers in east Java and north Sumatra, citrus groups in Bali and north Sumatra, and pineapple growers in west Java and north Sumatra. Mr. Winogrond will return to Indonesia on a regular basis during the life of AMARTA, and we fully expect to see some significant improvements in the tropical fruit industry in Indonesia.

Read more about Henry Winogrond