AGRIBISNIS HORTIKULTURA: PELUANG DAN TANTANGAN DALAM ERA PERDAGANGAN BEBAS

Abstract

During two last decades food trade in the world market was shift to horticultural
products such as fruits and vegetables. Household consumption of the products also tends to
increase in domestic market due to the increase of income per caput, induced by economic
growth. The two tendencies reveals that market of horticultural products will increase in the
future both in domestic and world markets, and barier of entry to the market will be
eliminated in the era of trade liberalisation. It is true that Indonesia had a surplus in the trade
of horticultural products, comes particularly from fruits trade, but this surplus is continuously
decreasing resulted from decrease of competitiveness of local agribusiness compared with
those from Africa and Southern America countries particularly. To increase competitiveness
of local agribusiness, future development of horticulture sector should be focused on three
efforts : (1) Development of vertically integrated agribusiness so that horticultural
agribusiness has capability to respond market demand effectively. This effort can be
implemented through development of partnership business system between input trader,
farmer and output trader. (2) Price stabilization of horticultural products, which can be taken
by establishment of regional agribusiness institution across producer regions. The main task
of the institution is to regulate supply quantity of overall producer adjusted to market
requirement. (3) Facilitation of post harvest infrastructure to farmers in order to retard
degradation of product quality and to improve bargaining position of farmers in the price
formation at producer market.