Antara News·Indonesia·Monday, November 9, 2026 at 10:11 AM UTC

Rote Ndao: From ancient earth pans to high-tech industrial salt hubs

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Moch Mardiansyah Al Afghani, Yashinta Difa

Jakarta (ANTARA) - A new morning dawns on the coast of Oetefu, greeting Yuliana Antonia Messa as she steps out to face her traditional salt pans, already drenched in the early morning sweat of hard labor.

Her perspiration bears quiet witness to a lifelong journey, carried by the woman affectionately known across the coastal settlements as Mama Nia.

For more than four decades, she has relied entirely on these shallow earth pans and the precious white crystalline grains they yield to sustain her family, anchoring her existence to the rhythm of the tides and the blazing equatorial sun.

For Mama Nia and the wider coastal communities scattered across Rote Island in East Nusa Tenggara, salt farming is far more than a mere occupation; it is a sacred way of life passed down meticulously from one generation to the next.

This enduring labor serves as the bedrock economic foundation for hundreds of families living along the rugged shores of this island, renowned geographically as the southernmost tip of the vast Indonesian archipelago.

It is a heritage of perseverance, sweat, and survival carved directly out of the coastal landscape.

"We, the people here, consider salt to be 'light.' We carry on the practices established by our ancestors; we continue this because, according to the Word of God, salt is the light of the world," Mama Nia shares.

Yet, after decades of depending exclusively on low-yielding traditional methods for their daily survival, these resilient coastal communities of Rote Ndao now find themselves standing at the precipice of a historic transformation, poised to elevate their ancestral trade to a modern industrial scale.

This remarkable turning point has emerged following a strategic government decision to designate Rote Ndao as the official site for the National Salt Industrial Center, widely known as K-SIGN.

Designed to serve as a premier national salt production hub, K-SIGN aims to drastically boost domestic supply while systematically reducing the nation's historical reliance on foreign imports.

The selection of Rote Ndao for this massive undertaking was executed through careful deliberation rather than arbitrary choice.

The region ticks every single box required for an optimal salt industrial zone, boasting expansive and flat terrain, a reliably long dry season, ideal soil texture, and intense solar heat—the essential natural ingredients required for high-efficiency seawater evaporation.

Given these exceptional geographic and climatic endowments, Rote is widely recognized as having immense, untapped potential for large-scale production.

"The development of K-SIGN in Rote Ndao is part of the mandate set forth in Presidential Regulation Number 17 of 2025 concerning the acceleration of national salt development," Head of the Kupang Salt Management Center Zaki Muhasin said.

"This regulation outlines three key strategies, including production intensification, the application of technology, and land extensification," he added.

This clear regulatory framework provides the momentum needed to modernize a sector that has remained largely unchanged for generations.

To bring this vision to life, the construction of K-SIGN is rolling out in carefully calculated stages.

The expansive first phase encompasses approximately 616 hectares of land, designed to establish the core infrastructure, followed by a planned second phase spanning an additional 751 hectares.

Within this sprawling facility, the mechanics of modern salt production unfold with precision, beginning with seawater pumped directly from coastal stations through an intricate 12.5-kilometer network of canals and production plots until it finally settles into the designated crystallization basins.

Every single phase of this journey demands meticulous technical oversight, ranging from careful management of water levels and flow rates to the continuous monitoring of salinity concentrations.

The ultimate goal is to guide the brine until it achieves an optimal density of 25 degrees Baumé.

Supported by modern mechanical pumps, water volumes across the production zone are precisely controlled and measured, freeing the facility from the mercy of unpredictable tidal fluctuations and dramatically stabilizing output.

This unprecedented level of process control is ultimately aimed at achieving a critical benchmark: uncompromising salt quality. K-SIGN targets a sodium chloride, or NaCl, content exceeding an impressive 97 percent.

Salt meeting these stringent industrial specifications is specifically earmarked to supply domestic manufacturing sectors, thereby helping to reduce reliance on imported salt.

In terms of raw productivity, K-SIGN targets an annual output of approximately 200 tons of salt per hectare.

This production target is expected to climb even higher as the facility expands and subsequent development phases are implemented.

According to Marine Affairs and Fisheries Minister Sakti Wahyu Trenggono, the national push to achieve complete salt self-sufficiency by 2027 focuses equally on scaling up volume and strictly meeting the high-grade quality requirements demanded by modern industries.

Official data from the ministry reveals a striking imbalance: national salt demand hovers between 4.8 million and 4.9 million tons annually, while domestic production historically struggles to yield more than one million to two million tons per year.

This persistent gap between domestic demand and domestic output forces Indonesia to import roughly 2.5 million to 3 million tons of salt every single year, primarily to service industries that demand high-quality salt.

Consequently, Minister Trenggono emphasizes that any quantitative expansion must be tightly coupled with technological upgrades so local salt can successfully compete on purity.

K-SIGN stands as the flagship initiative designed to bridge this divide.

Beyond national macroeconomic goals, the arrival of K-SIGN is already breathing new life into the local economy of Rote Ndao.

This tangible progress is clearly reflected in the region's economic growth rate, which surged significantly from 3.21 percent in 2024 to an impressive 7.96 percent in 2025.

"The presence of K-SIGN is considered to have a positive impact by creating job opportunities and increasing the income of some residents," Rote Ndao Regent Paulus Henuk noted, highlighting how large-scale industrial projects can harmonize with regional empowerment.

Local residents who once scraped by on seasonal harvests now find stable employment opportunities within the modern facility.

Meanwhile, Ahmad Heri Firdaus, a senior researcher at the Center for Industry, Trade, and Investment at the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF), underscores the importance of securing a reliable supply of raw materials for salt-consuming industries as Indonesia marches toward its 2027 self-sufficiency target.

Heri points out that salt is an indispensable raw material across multiple industrial sectors, acting as a crucial multiplier for economic added value.

As a result, any sudden cost volatility stemming from domestic shortages or supply chain bottlenecks must be carefully anticipated and mitigated to protect the competitiveness of Indonesian manufactured goods.

He advises the government to maintain a transparent, balanced roadmap toward 2027 that carefully weighs the aggressive scaling of local production against the immediate operational needs of industrial consumers.

True self-sufficiency, Heri argues, should never be measured solely by the milestone of halting imports, but rather by the long-term resilience and competitiveness of the broader national industrial ecosystem.

He notes that if domestic output falls short during the transitional period, measured imports will remain necessary to keep factories running.

However, such imports must be accompanied by efforts to expand domestic production capacity and advance the downstream processing of salt, ensuring that reliance on foreign supplies can be gradually reduced.

Only through this balanced approach can Indonesia steadily unshackle itself from foreign dependence, ensuring that the white crystals harvested from the sun-drenched shores of Rote Ndao and beyond will finally fuel a truly self-reliant industrial future.

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