People to compete for food and energy

People around the world will later compete for two basic needs which are energy and food as the global population increases, President Joko Widodo has predicted.

"Due to the increasing population globally men would compete for two things which are energy and food," he said when inaugurating the Nipah dam in Montor village in the district of Sampang on the island of Madura in East Java here Saturday.

The governments plan to build dozens of dams across the country is part of the countrys preparation to meet the situation so that Indonesia could be self-reliant in food, he said.

The government would continue building dams and within five years it is expected tens of them will have been finished, he said.

"This year we will finish eight and next year nine. The key to progress is water supply," he said.

The condition in East Nusa Tenggara is the same as in Sampang and seven dams will be built there, President Joko Widodo said. "That is what we are going to do. Production will increase and later it will be other countries that will ask for our excess production and not us that will import from them," he added.

Regarding Nipah dam, he said, it had been studied since 1973, followed by land clearing in 1982, but in 1993 it was discontinued because people did not like it. It was restarted again in 2008 but later stopped again.

"Last year I saw a solution. We cut the dam, so that it could contain water deeper," he said.

The case is the same as the Jatigede dam project in West Java, which was started in 1961 but then stopped due to peoples rejection despite the fact that the government had paid them compensation while construction had started, he said.

"Almost 55 years it was neglected, and so people started resettling there again forcing the government to clear them out again," he said.

The President expressed his thanks to clerics and district heads who gave the right explanation to the people so that the Nipah dam could be inaugurated that day. 

President Joko Widodo has recently also dedicated the Jatigede dam that has been completed.(*)

Source: ANTARA