The Soeharto government was extremely successful in curbing the population explosion and Indonesia was always lauded in the international press and setting an excellent example.

The administrations after Soeharto have failed abominably in

their efforts to successfully continue family planning programs. Many letters were written to the Post and other media outlets criticizing the current government in their failure to curb the population explosion.

All officials from the Health Ministry and the National Family Planning Coordination Agency (BKKBN) do is attend numerous conferences, seminars and workshops, without actively going into suburbs and rural areas in outlying islands to inform the poor and uneducated about how to stop unwanted and unnecessary births.

The government is not serious enough in trying to curb the population explosion. Last year I traveled extensively to Banda Aceh and Sabang, then back to Bogor, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Makasar, Toraja and Manado. I spoke to many people in rural areas and noticed many many children. I talked to numerous village women about birth control.

Many had never even heard of birth control methods. This means that the current administration has failed tremendously in this aspect. The only province that has done well is north Sulawesi because the provincial government is very serious about curbing the population explosion.

I spoke to midwives in villages south of Manado who said they had to walk or hitchhike with passing motorcycles or cars to reach rural areas to start informing the poor and needy about ways to prevent pregnancies. In many villages in Minahasa, farmers only have one or two children and refuse to have more.

Farmers' wives panic if the village midwife has run out of birth control pills or injections. However employees i.e. midwives working for the Family Planning Board in many provinces complained that they no longer get birth control pills and condoms that were previously distributed freely, or raincoats and umbrellas to withstand the rainy season, or transport such as motorcycles to travel to rural areas.

During the Soeharto administration, these were allocated to BKKBN employees who worked in the field and enabled midwives to reach rural areas to teach women how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. I urge the present administration to seriously tackle these problems.

I foresee serious economic, social and financial problems for Indonesia in the near future if the population explosion is disregarded. Muhadjir Darwin from the Center of Policy & Population studies of Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University is right by saying that NGO's should get involved in family planning programs.

Lynna van der Zee-Oehmke

Bogor, West Java

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