Indonesia's 2019 rice output falls 8% amid extreme weather - stats agency

Indonesia produced 54.6 million tonnes of unhusked rice in 2019, down around 8% from 59.2 million tonnes a year earlier, due to "extreme weather", Suhariyanto, head of the country's statistics agency (BPS) said on Tuesday.

"In 2019, the weather was unfavourable. There were heavy rains at the start of the year that caused flooding, followed by long drought," he told reporters.

The size of the country's total rice-harvested area shrank to 10.68 million hectare in 2019 due to the extreme weather, Suhariyanto said, down from 11.38 million hectare in 2018.

Meanwhile, the Land and Spatial Planning Ministry has updated Indonesia's overall rice field area to 7.46 million hectare (18.43 million acres) based on surveys done in 2018 and 2019, minister Sofyan Djalil said on Tuesday. The rice-harvested area is larger because it includes some fields harvested twice in a year.

(Reporting by Bernadette Christina Munthe; Writing by Fransiska Nangoy; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)