Nunkurus Salt Project Was Operating on Just 10 to 11 Hectares in 2019
Official releases and later reporting show that Nunkurus was an early-stage salt project in August 2019: about 10 to 11 hectares were active within a 600-hectare potential site.
By Mukmin John
Editor: Mursyid Sonsang
· Event date: · 3 min read
Kupang — — President Joko Widodo visited the salt ponds in Nunkurus, East Kupang, on 21 August 2019, and official accounts said the site was operating on about 10 hectares of a potential 600-hectare area.
The presidential website said the ponds in Nunkurus were producing on land of 10 hectares out of a 600-hectare potential area, while the State Secretariat said the same project had only just begun on 600 hectares and that 10 hectares had been turned into salt ponds.
Jokowi said the wider program in Kupang covered roughly 7,000 hectares of potential salt land, according to the State Secretariat’s English-language release. In the same visit, he inspected salt quality and said the local product was better than comparable salt samples from Madura, Surabaya and Australia, according to the presidential office’s release.
The figures reported for Nunkurus point to a project that was still in its early phase, not a fully developed 600-hectare salt farm. The most defensible reading of the official material is that 600 hectares described the planned or potential footprint, while the working area at the time was around 10 hectares.
A separate report by Mongabay, published four days later, said the Nunkurus site had 11 hectares in use and could produce 350 tonnes of industrial salt, with a full 600 hectares projected at 60,000 tonnes. That report aligns with the official narrative that only a small share of the area was active, though it gives slightly different area and output figures from the presidential release.
What the numbers mean
The percentage of land in use was about 1.7 percent to 1.8 percent, depending on whether the working area is described as 10 or 11 hectares. Either way, the active site was only a small fraction of the total area associated with the project.
Because the reports do not define the production period behind the 350-tonne figure, it should not be treated as an annual output figure. The 60,000-tonne estimate was a projection for a fully developed 600-hectare site, not a recorded harvest.
One local media report published in 2019 said the company PT Timor Livestock Lestari was managing the Nunkurus salt area and that 600 local workers were employed there, but that report is not corroborated by the official releases used here. For that reason, the company-management detail is treated cautiously in this rewrite and the employment figure is omitted from the main text.
Timeline
The visit on 21 August 2019 was presented as part of the government’s push to expand domestic salt production in East Nusa Tenggara. The presidential office said the remaining 600-hectare development would be pursued the following year.
In practical terms, the August 2019 material shows an incomplete project with a small operating core and a much larger planned area. The headline comparison between 600 hectares and 10 or 11 hectares is therefore accurate, but it refers to potential versus land actually in production, not to a fully functioning industrial salt estate.
Sources
Next story
Where do Komodo dragons live? Their wild range in Indonesia
Komodo dragons are wild only in a small part of eastern Indonesia, centered on Komodo National Park and nearby Flores. They favor dry savanna, open fo…
Related
