Muslims attend a mosque in Jakarta on Tuesday.During Ramadan Muslims are required to abstain from
food, drink and sex from dawn to dusk as
life slips into a lower gear during the day
A new bill set to be passed next month tightening halal labeling requirements on local products would unfairly burden millions of small businesses nationwide, representatives of the food sector said on Tuesday. The draft bill on halal product assurance, sponsored by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, is expected to be passed by lawmakers on Sept. 15. The bill states that all packaged food, drinks, medicine and cosmetics produced and sold in Indonesia must be certified as halal, or permissible for Muslim consumers, by an independent body to be set up by the ministry and the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI). The bill, meant to revamp the existing voluntary halal certification process, has had strong support from lawmakers, particularly after a series of scandals involving halal-labeled beef jerky found to have contained pork. The bill would not only affect large packaged food manufacturers but also cover even humble bakso meatball producers and traditional j amu medicine sellers. Suroso Natakusuma, chairman of the Food and Beverage Products Information Center (PIPIMM), said the proposed law could force many small businesses to close. “Forcing compliance would only harm micro- and small businesses,” he said. “[Certification], I believe, would only create more problems and burden them even more.” The bill proposes charging Rp 500,000 ($50) to Rp 2 million for halal certification, with the fees going to the government as non-tax revenues. Suroso estimated that of the more than one million food and beverage producers in the country, 91 percent were micro-sized home industries, 5 percent small-to-medium-sized ventures and the rest large-scale enterprises. Microbusinesses would therefore bear a disproportionate level of extra costs, he said. Neighborhood meatball producers could even face difficulties knowing whether their meat was halal. “You can imagine how difficult it would be for them,” Suroso said. The deputy chairman for public policy, taxation and customs at the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin), Hariyadi B Sukamdani, said the current voluntary halal certification was generally effective and should just be improved. “The urgency of halal labeling should be decided by customers; if they demand halal labeling on products, producers will voluntarily seek this certification,” he said.
