The Indonesian textile and textile product (TPT) industry is facing heavy pressure due to the flood of imported goods. The General Chairperson of the Indonesian Filament Fiber and Yarn Producers Association (APSyFI), Redma Gita Wiraswasta, said that the existence of an import mafia is the main culprit behind the decline in this sector. According to him, the mafia has great power in determining import quotas that only benefit certain groups, while related officials are said to be powerless in the face of their pressure.
Redma emphasized that the initial step to save the national textile industry is to clean up the import quota mafia. He said that no matter how good the control tools implemented by the government are, there will always be resistance if the mafia still controls the system. In fact, instruments such as technical considerations (Pertek) which should be a tool for limiting imports, are actually considered to weaken the competitiveness of local products because their implementation is ineffective.
Instead of suppressing imports, the current technical policies are considered to have actually marginalized local products in the domestic market. Data shows that instead of decreasing, imports have actually increased, while domestic factory utilization has decreased drastically. Redma also mentioned that various other protection instruments such as Anti-Dumping Import Duty (BMAD), safeguard measures, and Indonesian National Standard (SNI) obligations are often rejected or agreed to at very low rates.
He called the current condition a tsunami of imported goods, where the domestic market is massively flooded with foreign products. For the first time in the history of the national textile industry, Indonesia recorded a TPT trade deficit: exports decreased significantly, while imports increased sharply. This situation is considered very worrying and has the potential to permanently destroy the competitiveness of the domestic industry.
In line with this, the Executive Director of the Center of Reform on Economics (Core) Indonesia, Mohammad Faisal, highlighted that the surge in textile imports, especially from China, had occurred long before the era of President Donald Trump. In the 2023-2024 period, the trend of imports from China to Indonesia increased sharply, both through legal and illegal channels.
Faisal also revealed that there was a data gap between Chinese exports to Indonesia and import data recorded by the Indonesian government. The value of exports from China is much larger than Indonesia's import data, indicating an influx of goods that are not officially recorded—opening up suspicions of organized illegal import practices.
Amid global pressure and increasingly tight market competition, pressure on the government to improve the import monitoring system is growing stronger. Without comprehensive improvements, including the elimination of import quota mafia practices, the national textile industry is feared to be further depressed.