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Women unite to survive poverty, human trafficking
Local produce: A visitor buys fruit and vegetable from a local farmer at an agricultural exhibition in West Amanuban district, South Timor Tengah regency, East Nusa Tenggara
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Local produce:: A visitor buys fruit and vegetable from a local farmer at an agricultural exhibition in West Amanuban district, South Timor Tengah regency, East Nusa Tenggara. The crops presented at the event were produced by local farmersâ groups, whose members are predominantly women. (JP/Djemi Amnifu) (JP/Djemi Amnifu)
Local produce: A visitor buys fruit and vegetable from a local farmer at an agricultural exhibition in West Amanuban district, South Timor Tengah regency, East Nusa Tenggara. The crops presented at the event were produced by local farmers' groups, whose members are predominantly women. (JP/Djemi Amnifu)
Hundreds of local women gathered recently at an agricultural exhibition in West Amanuban district, South Timor Tengah regency, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), to share their success stories in collectively running croplands and helping their families survive economic hardship.
The event, held in Tublopo subdistrict, was aimed at not only exhibiting the crops produced by local female farmers' groups, but also inspiring more women in one of the country's poorest regions with the idea that they can make significant financial contributions to their families by using the available resources around them.
Norbes Selan, 24, who leads a female farmers' group in West Amanuban, for example, said her group could earn a significant amount of profit from selling their recent harvest yields to local markets.
'Together, we grow various crops, like tomatoes, yard-long beans, watermelon and chili, on a 1,000 square-meter plot of land. We are able to make up to Rp 70 million [US$5,045] in profit after harvest,' Norbes told reporters.
Norbes said her farmers' group was established last year and currently had 25 members, most of them are housewives. Since then, the group has been cultivating an idle plot of land in their neighborhood, with support from agricultural extension officers representing Jakarta-based NGO Plan International Indonesia and its local partner Gerbang Mas.
Norbes said the group had managed to deliver their products not only to Soe, the regency's capital, but also to the provincial capital of Kupang, located around 100 kilometers southwest of the regency.
'We sell our products for different prices in different areas,' she said, adding that the profit from the sales would be shared fairly with members of the group.
The latest data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) reveals that NTT has become one of the poorest regions in the country, with 19.6 percent of its population living in poverty. The number is only better compared to Papua and West Papua, whose poor residents make up 27.8 and 26.26 percent of the total population, respectively.
South Timor Tengah, meanwhile, is recorded as one of the poorest regions in NTT, with 102,101 poor residents living in the regency. The number makes up around a quarter from the total number of poor residents in the province.
Poverty has made many NTT residents prefer to leave the province to work overseas as migrant workers. Some of these aspiring migrant workers, however, have unfortunately fallen victim to human trafficking because of their limited knowledge of migration, prompting the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry to declare NTT at an emergency level regarding human trafficking.
Apart from poverty, the drought-prone NTT has also regularly suffered from food scarcity and harvest failures, particularly during the dry season.
Plan's country director Mingming Remata Evora said the exhibition showed that local women could play a major role in improving family welfare.
'The harvest [yields] and the exhibition show that women can be productive and independent in the economic sector,' she said.
Gerbang Mas chief Konrad Mariaman, meanwhile, said that the NGO's joint program with Plan had, over the past year, established 70 farmers' groups, involving 1,500 participants from 34 villages and nine districts in South Timor Tengah.
'80 percent of the participants are women,' Konrad said, adding that the program was also aimed at preparing the farmers' groups to manage their cropland independently in the long run.
South Timor Tengah deputy regent Obed Naitboho also applauded the program.
'I hope this program will continue and become a model for local economic empowerment as it is suitable with the characteristics of local residents, 90 percent of whom are farmers,' Obed said.
