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Editorial: Cassava the killer
The recent deaths of six siblings from the Central Java town of Jepara from suspect tiwul, a staple food made from dried cassava, was indeed tragic
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he recent deaths of six siblings from the Central Java town of Jepara from suspect tiwul, a staple food made from dried cassava, was indeed tragic. It may be an exaggeration to consider it a human tragedy, but the deaths speak volumes about the abject poverty many in the country are constantly facing.
This also serves as a warning that the situation may be aggravated in the coming months due to people’s weakening purchasing power amid the soaring prices of commodities.
Traditionally, tiwul is associated with poverty as it is a cheap substitute for rice, although creative cooks have produced recipes to allow well-off families to digest the carbohydrate-rich food.
Those who died from bad tiwul in Jepara came from a poor family, a family that claims to earn between Rp 150,000 (US$16) and Rp 200,000 per week and had to feed nine mouths. The family turned to tiwul two weeks before the incident as they could not afford to buy rice because the price was skyrocketing due to supply shortages from irregular weather, natural disasters and insect attacks.
The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) said rice price hikes contributed 1.29 percent to inflation in 2010, which neared 7 percent, up from 2.78 percent in 2009.
This poverty-related loss of life is ironic because of the country’s poverty eradication campaign, which, according to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has reduced the actual number and percentage of people living below the poverty line in the last six years. The latest BPS data revealed there were 31 million poor as of March 2010, down from 32.53 million in the same period a year earlier.
Almost every year the nation has been shocked by reports of the fatal impact of poverty, most notably the food crisis in 2005 and 2009 in the remote, impoverished Papua highland regency of Yahukimo that left dozens of people dead. The government claimed it was harvest failure instead of poverty that was responsible for the catastrophe.
Of course, the Jepara and Yahukimo stories or sporadic malnutrition deaths in pockets of poverty in rural or urban areas cannot kill the fairy tale of Indonesian development, which has gained international recognition. Indonesia was one of a small number of countries that managed to maintain economic growth despite 2008’s global economic crisis, and is predicted to emerge as one of the largest economies in the world in the future.
No one in this country should pass away because he or she has no money to buy food. But market operations to control the volatile prices of basic commodities, the distribution of cheap rice to the poor and other subsidy provision programs are just temporary solutions and will not fix the root causes of poverty.
With abundant natural and human resources at our disposal, Indonesia has many opportunities to quickly eradicate poverty.
At stake will be the Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded in 1998 to Amartya Sen, if even one Indonesian citizen dies of starvation. The economist Sen insists famine does not occur in democratic countries like Indonesia. He says even in very poor democracies, a ruling government’s survival will be threatened if there is famine, as elections are not easy to win after famines, nor is it easy to withstand criticism by opposition parties and the press.
As suggested by the Nobel laureate, political leadership matters in the fight against hunger and poverty.
We believe such leadership should exist not only in the months ahead of elections, but from the beginning to the end of political tenure.
