JAKARTA — Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto announced a restructuring of Indonesia's commodity export system during a plenary parliamentary session on May 20, 2026. The new system will funnel the country’s strategic natural-resource exports through a single, centralized, state-controlled gate.

At the center of this system is PT Danantara Sumberdaya Indonesia (DSI), a state-owned enterprise operating under the sovereign investment fund BPI Danantara. Until December 31, 2026, DSI will act as a transaction supervisor and export document verifier for coal, crude palm oil, and ferroalloys such as aluminum. Beginning January 1, 2027, the company will transition to a sole trader under a “buy-and-own” mechanism, requiring producers to sell commodities domestically to DSI, which will manage all exports and receive 100% of foreign-currency proceeds.

The Prabowo government justified the policy as an effort to reclaim economic sovereignty under Article 33 of Indonesia’s Constitution. The move follows an artificial intelligence-based investigation into commodity exports initiated by Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa and the National Single Window Agency. A random AI audit of ten major exporters found that shipments from Indonesian ports to the United States were documented as routed through subsidiaries in Singapore, and comparisons with U.S. import records showed destination port prices nearly double those reported domestically.

Data from the United Nations and the World Bank suggest Indonesia may have lost as much as US$908 billion in foreign-exchange earnings between 1991 and 2024 due to export manipulation through under-invoicing, volume discrepancies, and transfer pricing via shell companies. Despite these concerns, the upstream oil and gas sector has been permanently exempted from export centralization. Energy Minister Bahlil Lahadalia justified the exemption by stating that the sector is already tightly supervised by SKK Migas, leaving little room for fraud.

PT DSI reportedly begins operations with minimal capitalization, despite needing hundreds of trillions of rupiah in annual liquidity to sustain the buy-and-own mechanism. Indonesia’s benchmark stock index declined following the May 20, 2026 announcement. Article XVII of the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade requires state trading enterprises to operate solely on commercial considerations.