FOR the past five months the news has been haunting the Jakarta stock exchange floor. It reached its peak last week, when the price of crude palm oil (CPO) on the commodity market in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, plummeted to a mere US$812 (around Rp7.31 million) per ton.

That is the lowest price for this vegetable oil throughout 2008. A mere five months ago, the price of this export commodity that Indonesia is relying on was nearly double that pri