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Editorial: Poverty kills

Recent reports of a mother and her two children who died of hunger in the South Sulawesi capital Makassar and of five people who died of malnutrition-caused illnesses in the East Nusa Tenggara town of Ndao shed some light on a tragedy of humanity facing the country

The Jakarta Post
Thu, March 13, 2008

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Editorial: Poverty kills

Recent reports of a mother and her two children who died of hunger in the South Sulawesi capital Makassar and of five people who died of malnutrition-caused illnesses in the East Nusa Tenggara town of Ndao shed some light on a tragedy of humanity facing the country.

Not only do these deaths speak volumes about the depth of the poverty problem here, but they bring into question the government's credibility, given its apparent neglect of the social and economic well being of citizens.

That the central government quickly shifted the blame to local administrations will not repair the damage that has been done. The government's quick retreat to that old favorite, the blame game, is further cause for concern about the prospects of eventually winning the fight against poverty, because the government is apparently part of the problem instead of the solution.

There seems to be a lack of coordination among related bureaucracies entrusted with poverty alleviation programs, which is no less fatal than the absence of awareness among policy-makers about guaranteeing the rights of the needy. With the election year drawing near, we are worried the problem of poverty will further disappear from the national agenda, or conversely be misused by politicians in search of votes.

We still remember the move by House of Representatives lawmakers in 2005 to summon the government to clarify an outbreak of malnutrition in Papua, Java and East Nusa Tenggara, which left dozens dead. The showdown concluded with the government promising to provide Rp 300,000 a month in cash assistance to each low-income family, a policy that lasted just one year.

Comprehensive measures to address the root causes of poverty have been lacking because the issue has been reduced to a political commodity.

Indonesia's poverty rate stood at about 17 percent of the country's 220 million people in 2006, according to the Central Statistics Agency, which categorizes those earning less than $1.55 a day as living below the poverty line.

With the prices of many basic commodities having sharply risen of late, we can only imagine how people can live on that amount of money. They cannot afford to meet their minimum nutritional needs, let alone fulfill their basic needs for clothing and housing.

Malnutrition deprives people, particularly children, of protection from various diseases, which is one way poverty causes death. This has been exacerbated by poor healthcare for many who live in outlying and impoverished regions.

Economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Massachusetts, the United States, wrote in a paper published last December that in the case of Indonesia, there was very little difference in death rates between the poor and the extremely poor in all age groups, but the non-poor were less likely to die than the poor and the extremely poor.

This is true in both rural and urban areas. In rural areas, depending on the age group and whether we look ahead five or 10 years, the extremely poor are 1.4 to five times more likely to die than those who live on between $6 and $10 a day.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla once estimated the country would need at least Rp 1,000 trillion (about $111 billion) in new investment to accelerate economic growth, which many believe is key to reducing high poverty and unemployment rates. But with the government allocating too much of its annual budget on subsidies and debt servicing, little is left over for poverty alleviation.

In this regard, the government's reluctance to slash fuel subsidies looks like a pro-poor policy, but in fact it robs the poor of much of the money to which they are entitled. The subsidies have long gone to millions of people who are by any standard not poor.

The latest deaths as a result of hunger and malnutrition could be the mere tip of the iceberg for poverty problems in the country, as well as the chronic problem of poor governance, characterized by an inability to generate policies that protect the weak. The longer poverty prevails, the more people will die and the less legitimate, at least morally, the government.

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