Indonesia expects its unhusked rice production to increase by nearly 1 percent this year to 54.66 million tonnes, the state statistics bureau said on Wednesday. The bureau said Indonesia produced 54.15 million tonnes of unhusked rice in 2005.
"The increase in unhusked rice production is due to expansion of harvested paddy fields of around 16,000 hectares, especially in outer Java island, and improved productivity," Rusman Heriawan, the head of the statistics bureau, told a news conference.
The country's state logistics agency Bulog signed deals in late September to buy 210,000 tonnes of Vietnamese rice from three trading houses for delivery between October 1 and November 15 to shore up government stocks depleted by a string of natural disasters.