JAKARTA- About 50 Australian dairy cows have arrived in Indonesia as the first cattle imports under a plan to boost milk production needed for President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship free meals program, Indonesia’s agriculture ministry said.
Indonesia plans to import 1 million dairy cows from 2025 to 2028 to support the scheme, which will launch early next year and eventually aims to offer free meals to more than 80 million school children.
The heifers, which are between 3 and 7 months pregnant, were flown from Australia and arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday and will be moved to Lampung province in southern Sumatra.
“Hopefully these dairy cows would start producing milk for local needs by mid next year,” Agung Suganda, Director General of Livestock and Animal Health at the Agriculture Ministry, said in a statement on Wednesday.
In addition to the heifers, Indonesia also received 600 dairy lambs and dairy goats from Australia.
The arrival of the livestock was “concrete action to accelerate dairy cow investment which in parallel supports the free meals program”, the agriculture ministry said.
The free meals program is forecast to need 3.6 million metric tons of milk when running at full scale in 2029, bringing total national demand to 8.5 million metric tons.
Indonesia’s milk output this year is estimated at 1 million metric tons while demand is projected at 4.7 million tons.
The agriculture ministry has previously said that Indonesia could also import dairy cows from Brazil, New Zealand, the United States and Mexico.
Earlier, Indonesia said it is considering a plan to import 1 million metric tons of rice from India in 2025 to secure supply until its main harvest, Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs Zulkifli Hasan said after a meeting of food and agricultural officials.
Indonesia’s rice output is estimated to fall 2.43 percent this year to 30.34 million metric tons, due to a delay in planting and harvest season amid longer dry weather in 2023, the statistics bureau said earlier this month. – Reuters
