Competitiveness and development perspective of processed cocoa industries in East Java

This research aimed to identify the potential development of East Java's cocoa beans and to analyze the competitiveness of East Java's processed cocoa industry development. Quantitative descriptive analysis was the method used in this research with location quotients (LQ) to answer the first goal. Trend analysis and the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) method were applied to answer the second goal. The LQ method showed the potential of East Java's cocoa kernels with rates (0.92-2.97) and average LQ (1.86) per year indicating that East Java's cocoa beans have potential for the development of processed cocoa industry. The competitiveness resulted in the RCA calculation, for processed cocoa commodity it rated < 1. This means that East Java's processed cocoa products have no competitiveness yet in the national market. Several efforts for increasing the competitiveness of processed cocoa industry are as follows: to increase export volume, to maintain export price, to expand the processed cocoa industry clusters, to facilitate financing access, to deregulate policy and to develop infrastructure. Keywords: Cocoa beans, industry, national market