Improving Agricultural Market Performance:
Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems
82
6.2.1.1 Funding of Government MIS
Personnel costs are covered by the MoA but this does not entail incremental salary expenditure
as the staff undertake other core activities. For example, at district level, it is the Agricultural
Officers who collect price information from farmers by phoning them and also by visiting local
markets and asking traders about prevailing prices. This does not detract from their core
functions such as providing farm extension to farmers and monitoring production and/or yield
data. Likewise, at the CADIS the staff of 9 in a dedicated sub-division spend only about 25% of
their time working on the MIS as they perform other official tasks. The financial resources for
the required ITC infrastructure (e.g. computers, bandwidth) are again provided by MoA. The
Ministry also pays each of the district and provincial staff Rp 500,000 (i.e US$41) per month to
cover data collection and transmission costs. In the past, the MoA also purchased telephones for
the staff but this has been discontinued.
6.2.1.2 Role of The Ministry of Trade In MIS
The main remit of the Ministry of Trade (MoT) as far as information relevant to agricultural
markets is concerned is to collect and disseminate information on food prices at retail level,
mainly consumer prices. The data is collectedmainly fromurban areas – from about 30 big cities
in the country. The MoT shares the information it collects with other government agencies
including the MoA, which publishes the price information as part of its MIS function. However,
the MoT and the BPS use the information collected primarily for tracking inflation and, in
particular, food prices for purposes of advising government actions to mitigate any potential
food price shocks. The MoT usually publishes the information on its website targeting other
parts of government and private sector actors. The publication is in both English and the official
Indonesian Bahasa language.The main remit of the Ministry of Trade (MoT) as far as information relevant to agricultural
markets is concerned is to collect and disseminate information on food prices at retail level,
mainly consumer prices for selected commodities (Figure 34 below). The data is collected
mainly from urban areas – from about 30 big cities in the country. The MoT shares the
information it collects with other government agencies including the MoA, which publishes the
price information as part of its MIS function. However, the MoT and the BPS use the information
collected primarily for tracking inflation and, in particular, food prices for purposes of advising
government actions to mitigate any potential food price shocks. The MoT usually publishes the
information on its website targeting other parts of government and private sector actors. The
publication is in both English and Bahasa Indonesian.
6.2.1.3 Role of the Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS or National Office of Statistics) The coordinating role of the BPS entails receiving all data and information collected by the MoA
and MoT though they also sometimes collect primary price data from the same sources as the
others henever the BPS publishes any information or data it acknowledges the primary
sourc . Its role is seen as important in ensuring quality control of the data published in order
to avo different, and sometimes confusing, data being published by different government
departments. This is not only to improve the quality of data which non-government actors can
2 (accessed 26/10/2017)