Jakarta. Indonesia is considering introducing incentives to draw capital into its palm oil sector as the country wants to move away from raw commodity export.

In a recent conference with foreign ambassadors, Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa said that Indonesia had been doing its best to make the country investor-friendly. These "structural reforms" will possibly extend to the palm oil sector, some aimed at drawing capital into the production of higher-value products.

“In the future, we will probably provide some taxes on raw crude palm oil [CPO] export and incentives for the downstream palm oil products,” Purbaya told the forum in Jakarta on Tuesday.

“We invite companies from your area to invest in my country to produce [more sophisticated] products based on CPO.” 

Purbaya was short on the details of these incentives. 

Investors have displayed quite an appetite for Indonesia’s palm oil sector. The government estimated that Indonesia had amassed around Rp 18.3 trillion (approximately $1 billion) in investments meant to help the country move up the palm oil value chain between January and March.

Indonesia did not say whether the money had come from domestic or foreign sources. Palm oil is in nearly everything, with this vegetable oil found in close to half of the packaged goods in supermarkets.

Indonesia has been banking on the so-called “debottlenecking task force” to address the problems that might come the investors’ way. Within six months of its establishment, the team claimed to have resolved problems that had hindered up to $30 billion worth of investments. 

Indonesia’s exports of CPO and its derivatives totaled $6.11 billion in Q1 2026, government data showed. The country is known to be the world’s largest palm oil supplier.

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