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Editorial: Bring family planning back
Forget all the nice things President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in his state of the nation address and focus on the one issue that he referred to only once in his speech, but the one that really matters for the nation and the president himself
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orget all the nice things President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in his state of the nation address and focus on the one issue that he referred to only once in his speech, but the one that really matters for the nation and the president himself.
The Indonesian population, based on the massive nationwide census held early this year, is officially put at exactly 237,556,363 as of July 1, 2010. For such a large and important undertaking, it was surprising that the President did not elaborate about the implications of this finding.
He may have had a good reason for doing so. Behind this figure is a host of questions that he would probably rather not answer, because he doesn’t have them.
Number one, it is a reflection of the failure of the national family planning program, particularly in the last 12 years, more precisely since the end of the Soeharto regime. The final number, let’s round it up to 237.6 million, overshoots the government’s own estimate of 234.1 million made 10 years ago based on the last population census.
The Central Statistical Agency said the net population growth in the last 10 years averaged 1.49 percent each year, basically unchanged from what we had in the 1990-2000 period.
This figure conceals the fact that, at this rate, Indonesia’s population according to one estimate will grow by as many as 15 million people in the next five years, and that the 250 million mark will be surpassed under Yudhoyono’s watch.
This raises the next important questions like how is the nation going to feed the additional 15 million mouths (more than three times the size of Singapore), how are we going to send them to school, will the economy be large enough to absorb them into gainful employment, and other important questions related to their welfare and prosperity.
The threat of a Malthusian catastrophe, named after a 19th century British neo-classical economist, that at some stage population growth will outstrip food production, may not be imminent, but given the scale of the challenge, we should not dismiss it lightly either. It would only take a huge disaster of the scale similar to the massive floods in Pakistan to make that threat into a reality.
For all his faults, one thing we can say about Soeharto is that he was right on the money when he progressively campaigned for a national family planning program. During the 30 years of his dictatorship, population growth declined from an annual average of 2.31 percent to 1.49 percent, thus sparing the nation from the Malthusian trap.
Now that the man is gone, surely it does not mean that we cannot continue some of the good legacies that he had begun.
We can’t bring Soeharto back from the dead, but we can bring family planning back to the top of the national agenda.
