Governor of the National Defense Institute (Lemhannas) of Indonesia Andi Widjajanto has recommended that tin from Bangka Belitung Islands province (Babel) be designated as a strategic commodity to boost national economic growth. "We will recommend tin as a strategic commodity to the President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo," he informed after the “2023 Long-Term Study Focus Group Discussion (FGD)” themed "Returning tin into a strategic mineral in order to secure control of mineral assets” in Pangkalpinang on Friday afternoon.

He said he supports designating tin as a strategic commodity to make Indonesia one of the world's major tin players."The homework is to rearrange the governance of tin mining from upstream to downstream. With mutually agreed governance, it will enable the downstreaming of the tin industry to the manufacturing industry," he added. According to him, Lemhannas will use the results of the FGD as inputs while conveying aspirations to President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) in relation to how the process of strengthening governance is in accordance with the draft devised by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in July 2021.

"The operational challenges have been conveyed, they have been paid attention to, so we just need to arrange them in Jakarta to become strategic recommendations to President Jokowi," he said. He added that the governance of mining activities must be 100-percent legal because it would be strange to have something continuing to be illegal in a rule-of-law state. "We have to reorganize and all tin miners must be legal and pay attention to the people's miners working together with state-owned PT Timah corporation because we from the government certainly rely on PT Timah as a way forward," he said.

Source: https://en.antaranews.com/news/275895/lemhannas-recommends-tin-as-national-strategic-commodity