IMPORTING SALT IS NOT THE BEST WAY FOR INDONESIA’s SCARCITY OF SALT.
Salt is an important thing for Indonesian people, every day they use salt on their foods, industries, and others. This makes the needs of salt for Indonesian people remains high, therefore Indonesian government decided to import salt from other countries (such as Australia) because they think that the availability of salt in the country cannot fulfill those needs. (Nababan) argues that Indonesia has imported salt since 1990 at US$16,97million, this has become a habit for Indonesia to import salt until now. In this essay, some reasons are presented on why Indonesian government should consider stopping the dependency of importing salt since Indonesia has the abundance of resources…show more content… Bad weather on last year made the local salt farmers should spent more costs to produce the salt and it made the price of the salt from local farmers became high. (Abdussalam) said that the price of a large pack of salt in Jakarta can be sold on 50 thousand rupiah while it should be 30 thousand rupiah. This condition makes the government decided to import lots of salt and those make the price of the salt in the market are decreasing. (Putra) argues that the price of local salt has been decreasing recently since Indonesia imported salt, before import the price of local salt reached 175 thousand rupiah, but in July it weakens until 150 thousand rupiah. It makes the demand for the local salt has declined because imported salt has monopolized the market and it gives many losses for the local farmers of salt. Both the demand and the profit margin has decreased because the imported salt has a lower price, of course the consumer will prefer to buy the lowest one and imported salt became a big competitor for the local salt farmers. At the end, a lot of local salt farmers will stop from being a local salt farmer and change their job due to their losses. They will think that their product will always unable to compete with imported salt since the government always import salt from other countries. For example (Idhom) said that based on data from Kiara that local salt farmers have been decreasing on the last five years, they changed their job because a lot of them has suffered from losses. If this condition will continuing, this will give many disadvantages to the government because the number of salt production will always decrease and the dependency of Indonesia with imported salt will