Your Excellency President Lee Jae Myung;
Excellencies Leaders of APEC Economies.
Once again, I would like to commend President Lee Jae Myung and his government for organizing this summit in such an efficient and great way.
As we know, we are entering a new era, defined by the rise of technology, high-tech, and especially artificial intelligence. We also understand shifting demographics.
In the case of Indonesia, we must admit that Indonesia is behind many of the other economies of the APEC. We have still massive poverty or a lot of our people also experience hunger, and that is why the urgency of Indonesia—this we are telling our partners of the APEC economies—the urgency of us is to overcome the problems of poverty and hunger immediately and as soon as possible.
We are concentrating all our efforts, and that’s why we are feeling that we can benefit from AI. We are using AI in agriculture to have a precise and modern agriculture techniques, and this has made us self-sufficient in rice and corn production in one year. Our target was four years self-sufficiency, but the use of high-tech precision farming and AI have enabled us to increase our production to the highest level in the history of independent Indonesia. So, we see the great benefits of AI and high technology, especially a smart technology.
However, we also see that we need cooperation on transnational crime because we are suffering a lot from this, from illegal smuggling, from corruption, from narcotics smuggling. This is endangering our use, and also online gambling is very, very serious. We are losing, it’s calculated that we’re losing about $8 billion a year just by the outflow from online gambling. So, we support APEC cooperation to enhance digital skills.
Also in the field of education, we feel Indonesia is behind the rest of the APEC economies in the field of education. This is very objective, and I believe that Indonesia must face up to our shortcomings, and that’s why my government feels the urgency to catch up with the other economies in the field of education, and that’s why we would like to take part in all the APEC enhancement of capacity in the field of technology, and also we would like to empower our small businesses, and also to improve our health system in the anticipation of the shifting in demography.
I think, this is the way to go. We must secure our control of technology. And I think, with cooperation within APEC, we can get this control.
Thank you very much.