Agricom.id, JAKARTA – In many opportunities, Minister of Agriculture, Syahrul Yasin Limpo (SYL) took many sides to do food diversification as one strategy to maintain the food availability namely in the pandemic. That is why, ministry of agriculture always incessantly realizes the food diversification to reduce the food consumption dependence which tends to focus on one commodity from carbohydrate. This is the same with the increasing local food procurement and consumption, such as, corn, cassava, sago, potato, banana, and taro.

According to Head of Badan Ketahanan Pangan, Agung Hendriadi, the achievement of the food diversification is the decreasing rice consumption and the increasing of local food consumption as the non-rice carbohydrate source.

“The increasing local food consumption from non-rice sources is the way to know. It means that the rice consumption would decrease if the non-rice source of carbohydrate increases,” he said, Wednesday (14/10/2020) as in the official statement to Agricom.id.

He also thought that the food diversification should be followed by the people’s access improvement to non-rice local food.

“We need to do two things, such as, the promotion and access improvement. How the people are easy to get the product, it is the access. If I want to eat cassava, for instance, I need to get it easily,” Agung said.

To increase the access, he thought that there are some things to do, such as, encouraging the development of micro, small, medium business (MSMB) for the local food. “The second is it needs to get open the market access easily, it needs to develop the MSMB, not to increase the production only but also to give the open market access,” he said.

Agung also mentioned it needs to get the market-place to increase the product selling of the farmers and MSMB and the consumers should be easy to get the local food products.

“We prepare the local food outlet in every pasar mitra tani/TTIC in the provincial level. Not only that, we also open many accesses, including the online system or social media,” he said. (A2)