Indonesia's SME Minister Calls for Preventing Inflow of Illegal Imports

The Minister for Cooperatives and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MenKopUKM) asked the Ministry of Trade (Kemendag) to further tighten control over the flow of imported goods, especially finished products or consumer goods, in order to protect local products from the onslaught of imported goods.The government is pushing for trade regulation to tighten the inflow of goods, especially consumer goods.However, this must be inspected as the inflow of goods may be legal or illegal and the government will continue to work to protect local products. He was also concerned about the free trade system currently in place in Indonesia, and felt that if free trade did not regulate inbound flows, local products could be increasingly eroded and become less competitive with imports. For this reason he has a number of ways to ensure that Indonesian MSMEs remain competitive, one of which is the establishment of co-production plants or shared factories. The Government continued its efforts to protect local products, local brands, and domestic products from competition from foreign products with very low production costs, which perhaps also led to dumping, etc.

This comes after the Trade Minister revealed a new mode of selling illegally imported goods, one of which is carried out by foreigners (WNA) using warehouses as storage and sales headquarters, which has been widely used. He revealed this during an inspection of illegally imported goods in a warehouse area in North Jakarta recently. From the results of the investigation, the foreigner was the culprit in the task force's first discovery of Rp 40 billion worth of illegally imported goods. That's why the Ministry of Trade, together with the task force, also asked mayors, regents, governors, and heads of regional offices to try to monitor and report immediately to the government because they received too many reports that there could be 30-40 large warehouse tenants in each province operating online like this. The way this foreigner is operating in Indonesia is importing illegal goods without a license, he is not using SNI nor any type of HS and the government is also confused on how the goods got here.