Indonesia Still Imports 90% of Its Pharmaceutical Raw Materials — Despite Its Abundant Biodiversity

Indonesia holds some of the richest biodiversity on earth — thousands of plant species with medicinal potential grow here. The irony is that the national pharmaceutical industry still imports up to 90% of its active ingredients. The government put the issue back in the spotlight this week.

At a working session with Commission VII of the Indonesian House of Representatives on 14 July 2026, Deputy Minister of Industry Faisol Riza argued that strengthening national industry is not only about adding production capacity, but about strengthening the upstream industry so the supply chain becomes more self-reliant. Pharmaceuticals are the clearest example: such heavy dependence on imported inputs leaves domestic competitiveness exposed to any disruption in global supply.

In response, the government is now mapping which sectors to prioritise under an import-substitution programme — identifying the products most in need of domestic substitution, with pharmaceuticals as one of the strategic focuses.

The Irony: Rich in Biodiversity, Yet Importing the Inputs

What makes the 90% figure sting is that most of those raw materials are already here. Indonesia has tropical rainforest, mangroves and marine biodiversity holding thousands of natural compounds with pharmaceutical potential. The problem is not resource availability but the bridge from research to industry: how that biological wealth gets mapped, scientifically validated, and then turned into inputs and products the industry actually uses.

Why This Matters for Sciencepreneurship

That gap is the heart of what sciencepreneurship does. Connecting natural-product research to industry — through initiatives such as INPL (Indonesian Natural Products Library), which catalogues Indonesia's natural compounds, alongside research-commercialisation services and science-based products — is a concrete attempt to turn biodiversity from an untapped resource into a driver of raw-material self-reliance.

Pharmaceutical self-reliance will not arrive through import-substitution policy alone; it also needs an ecosystem that brings scientists, industry and the market into the same room. That is precisely where SciencePreneur and sciencepreneurs come in.

This article is a science and industry news summary written for educational purposes, with a SciencePreneur perspective.