Poverty: Disparity between Provinces
Right to Food
Human Development in Indonesia
Question for the young

Poverty: Disparity between Provinces

Susilo Ady Kuncoro

The eradication of poverty and hunger is, with good reason, the first of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). By 1990, more than 1.25 billion people worldwide were estimated to be living in extreme poverty or surviving on less than $1 per day.  More than 19 percent of people in developing countries currently live in extreme poverty, while in sub-Saharan Africa the present figure is around 41 percent (almost 1 in 2 people).

Fast forward to 2004 – in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which devastated many developing countries including Indonesia, it is clear that many countries are capable of reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in which the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has risen. In contrast, Indonesia has succeeded in reducing poverty levels by more than half.

It is often argued that extreme poverty indicators may not be the most accurate measurement of progress in Indonesia, other Southeast Asian countries, and Latin America. This is true. Indeed, based on the national poverty line in Indonesia, the proportion of people living in poverty only declined gradually, from 18.2 percent to 16.6 percent, in the early part of this decade. More significant is the proportion of the population falling into the 'almost poor' category. The 2007 national poverty threshold was the equivalent of $1.60, resulting in more than 37 million Indonesians being categorised as 'poor'. What about the 'almost poor'? Assuming that people who are 'almost poor' are living on more than $1.60 and less than $2 per day, the total number of Indonesians in this group is greater than 100 million.

Poverty in the state:

Extreme poverty is not Indonesia's biggest problem. While there has not been a dramatic reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty, Indonesia-specific indices suggest that progress is being made in this area.  The economic crisis in the late 1990s had a major impact on poverty in Indonesia. The proportion of the population living in poverty increased by almost 50 percent compared with 1996 levels. The largest increases occurred in cities, with the number of urban poor rising by more than 80 percent in that period. By comparison, poverty in rural areas increased by only 30 percent.

In 2007, the proportion of people living in poverty stood at 16.6 percent. However, some people believe that there are significant differences between provinces in terms of the number of people living in poverty . This article will look at provinces with the highest and lowest proportion of residents living below the poverty line during the period 2002 to 2007.

Some provinces have been more successful than others in reducing poverty. This includes Maluku, South Sumatra and East Nusa Tenggara provinces, and provinces with the highest proportion of people living in poverty. Between 2002 and 2007, Gorontalo Province achieved the largest reduction in the proportion of people living in poverty. Nearly half of the other provinces failed to reduce the proportion of people living in poverty by more than 2 percent over the five year period. Some of those provinces already had some of the lowest levels of poverty in Indonesia. In effect, these provinces are failing to demonstrate progress in the fight against poverty. DKI Jakarta Province, which has the lowest proportion of people living in poverty in the country, has actually experienced an increase in poverty since 2004.

This article will explain how the reduction of poverty at provincial level was achieved between 2002 and 2007. An examination of the information presented above suggests that progress in poverty reduction has been achieved. However, it seems clear that success has not been as significant as initially hoped. The proportion of people in the 'almost poor' category remains high. These people can easily slip back into poverty.

It cannot be denied that more people are suffering from poverty in some regions of Indonesia than in others. Nevertheless, a lot of progress has occurred, especially in the period between 2002 and 2007.

The writer is a Project Officer for TARGETMDGs (BAPENAS/UNDP)

Right to Food

Ivan A. Hadar

Every seven seconds, a child under ten years of age died from hunger. While there were about 826 million of people, permanently, suffer from severe malnutrition (Jean Ziegler, 2006). In this country, the news about death cases due to starvation and other malnutrition cases in several areas throughout the country, not only questioned our humanity, but also shocked many of us as these cases occured on areas that (once) identified as rice or other food staples’ producers.

The agricultural development, as one of labor-intensive sector, has became the victim of the tariff’s policies, such as the cut of subsidies and imports of agricultural products that have suffered farmers and aggravated the development in that particular sector.

The growth sources focused solely on the consumptive and capital-intensive sectors. It is no surprise that there were times that every one percent growth was used to create between 300,000 and 400,000 job opportunities, and now it can only create about 178,000 jobs. Eventually, more and more population are falling into poverty. By using the World Bank indicator, those who are considered as poor as to live under 2 USD/day come out at fantastic figures, 135 million inhabitants.

Whereas, in Food Summit in Rome over 10 years ago, all the participating countries including Indonesia have determined to reduce to half the global famine rate from 840 million inhabitants in 2015. Yet, according to FAO 2005, the total starving population increased to 825 million inhabitants (???).

According to the Task Force on Hunger - a UN formed agency - despite the rapid urbanization,  80% of the total world population still live in the rural areas. While half of these rural people who face food security and starvation problems come from poor farmers' families. Two third of poor farmers are considered marginalized because they have barren land, isolated and no land right security and no access to loans. The other reasons are they suffer from bad infrastructure and have high dependence on the intermediaries. About 30% of these farmers are worse off as they do not have their own land and work as farm labors or seasonal fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the forest products (Armin Paasch, 2006). The fulfillment of right to food should be firstly targeted at these people.

In reality, since the last decade, they have been worse off. The structural changes in the form of commercialization of productive resources, such as land, water and seedlings; the plummeting of agricultural products’ prices and the asymmetry liberalization of agricultural trading are the causes behind the situation. The shrink of the size of development aid in this sector has also intensified the marginalization, from 25 million USD to only 12 million USD between 1986 and 2000 (Windfuhr, 2005).
In response to a critic rose by an independent institution, several rich countries argued that the reduced size of multilateral development funding was, in fact, one of the positive impacts of the efficiency.

Theoretically, the claim may be justified. However, many doubt the multilateral initiatives related to landreform accessibility, e.g the one proposed by the World Bank, will bring positive impacts for those who starve. Landreform is a new economic and political term in which one of the keyword is property rights. The utilization of the term of accessibility reminds us to Amartya Sen and his assumption of entitlement, that no one should be hungry as there are sufficient foods in the world. Those who starve are because they have no access to food production.

Following the World War II, three Asian countries that implemented landreform successfully were Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Tenant farmers changed their status into land owners, while the landlords were advised to invest their land compensation to the industry sector. The status changes from tenant to owner, politically and economically, had several positive impacts. Not only that the new land owners possessed, besides their lands, infrastructure such as building and production tools; but also they understood the working system and they experienced as both manager and farmer.

When the similar system was implemented, for instance in Brazil and the Philippines in mid 1990s, the Word Bank imposed “a market support landreform”. The assumption was that a successful landreform required the voluntary participation from the landlords. Unlike the classic agrarian reform, the market support landreform does not take over the lands of the landlords, but orients more to willing buyer – willing seller concept.

Through flexible combination between loans and subsidies, the farmers without land groups bought land that were voluntarily sold by the landlords and invested for the land management. Direct payment based on market price was expected to weaken the resistance of the landlords and stimulated the land market and efficiency of market oriented production. The state’s role, through the local governments in this model, was limited in providing rules and regulation for the functioning of loans and land markets as well as in becoming intermediary between buyer and seller.

The World Bank was optimistic that this model was able to synergize the economic growth and the poverty eradication. However, independent analyst with Brazil, Columbia and South African experiences, concluded that the model did not work as expected. The goal of agricultural reforms in those countries was not accomplished, qualitatively and quantitatively. Nonetheless, despite the World Bank admitted the deficit (2003), it still insisted to expand the model implementation in other countries. In fact, South Africa who followed the World Bank’s advice, during the trial period (1995-1999) only distributed 1.65% or 200,000 hectares of the total 29 million hectares of available land (Borras, 2003). Similar situation happened in Brazil and Columbia together with land prices’ rise beyond their actual qualities and location. No wonder that the global peasants network ‘La Via Campesina’, for instance, demanded that the World Bank agrarian reform stopped prior the release of independent evaluation result on the programme impact to rural poverty (Paasch, 2002).

The answer to the weakness of the agrarian reform by state, according to La Via Campesina, is not the abolition of the program, but rather improving and strengthening the roles. “Agrarian reform is the responsibility of the state in enforcing the human right, ie., the right to food. The government is obliged to fulfill the most fundamental  human rights by providing access to land, seedlings, water and other productive resources so that the people can make available their own food” said Sofia Monsalve, coordinator for the international campaign on the agrarian reform “ Bread land and Freedom”, which was supported by La Via Campesina.

The latest data from BPS demonstrated that, in Indonesia, more than one third of children under five years of age, with the majorities come from peasant families, farm labors, fishermen and illegal loggers, are malnourished. This situation is frightening considering that their range of age is vital for the coming health and intelligence development, thus the nutritious food consumption is envitable. Without a strong political will from the government, the situation will not improve. Because of the current situation, in addition with the drugs addition and other negative impacts of modern lifestyles, the majority of the next generation might be at risk to be categorized as “the lost generation”. If this happens, anyone who has made promises to be pro poor during his/her political campaign, will become the accused in his/her own nation’s historical passage.

The writer is the TARGETMDGs National Coordinator (BAPENAS/UNDP).

Human Development in Indonesia

Owais Parray

The main focus of development should be the human itself. Although, at least until the 1980s, the conventional mindset still valued the country's economic growth as the main goal. This mindset was started to be questioned seriously along with the emergence of the Human Development concept as the alternative development framework, put forward by the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and the Pakistani economist, Mahboob-ul-Haq.

Differ from the conventional measurement that purely use the economic terms such as Gross Domestic Product, the Human Development framework expands its definition to measure the ‘quality of life’. As the development subject, the people are not only seen as ‘input’ for the development and the poor ones are no longer perceived as passive recipients of development aid from the government. They become the main subject along with the beneficiaries of the development.

This concept is about community and people, on how to develop their options and capabilities to live longer, healthier, be knowledgable and creative. Human development consists of the following: namely equitable and sustainable economic growth, fulfillment of the human rights, participation, security and political freedom. Since 1990, when UNDP published the first Human Development Report, the concept has become an influential tool to increase public awareness in determining the development policies.

Many countries have adopted the Human Development paradigm to formulate various national policies and programmes. Each year, the Human Development Report presents latest rating of various countries based on Human Development Index (HDI). The index is a combination of different development achievements such as life expectancy, education level and income.

Until the monetary crisis, Indonesia benefited from the impressive growth rate which allowed the implementation of huge steps in improving the public services to its citizens and in improving the poverty. Even though, the current progress has not imitated the previous success, the overall achievement in the HDI has been fairly well. It is worth to note that HDI demonstrates several achievements over certain period, in which after the independence, Indonesia was among the best player in the South East Asia. For illustration, let’s compare Indonesia- in the 107th rank (Human Development Report 2007/2008) with its two closest neighbours, Malaysia and Singapore who are placed in higher ranks. Between 1975 and 2005, Indonesia was able to add 25 points in average to its HDI, while both Singapore and Malaysia increased around 20 points to their HDIs over the same period. One might argue that in 1975 Indonesia was far below Singapore and Malaysia and as a result, the HDI improvement, over the last three decades, looked impressive because Indonesia had to catch up its lagging.

Up to a certain level, it may be true that Indonesia has overall better achievement than China and India (who both enjoy high growth rates). It seems that only Oman (33 points) has achieved better than Indonesia throughout the period.

The Indonesia achievement in the GDP and life expectancy index is rather low, while the education level is almost similar to the Malaysian’ level – ranked 63th in the overall HDI. It is interesting to note that there are several countries with higher HDI level that actually have lower GDP per capita, and their ranks in the HDI are boosted up by better rates in the education sectors. It is no surprising that many of these countries have wide coverage of their social nets by providing significant public services to their inhabitants.

Cuba is placed in much better rank than Indonesia, when we compare the total of HDI scores without considering the GDP. Other countries in similar situation include Armenia, Ecuador and Georgia. Except Tanzania, there are only few countries in the report categorized under “Low Human Development” that demonstrate positive HDI scores without GDP. However, Botswana that is considered in “Middle Human Development” is an interesting case. Although it has a rather high GDP, even above the Malaysian GDP, it is ranked 124th in the HDI, because of the low life expectancy level. 

The slow economic growth in Indonesia, due to monetary crisis, has resulted in the slow progress of the HDI improvement. All of the HDI indexes have equal weight and are closely related, so any progress in one of the index will generate improvement in other dimension. In short term, poverty alleviation may be an effective tool to accelerate Human Development quality improvement in this country.

Unlike to what have occurred in the past, future efforts must consider the decentralization in Indonesia to make sure that the least-developed provinces and districts can contribute to the economic growth in the future. Most importantly, the growth model should be made inclusive to really diversify economic options for the poor. This country in general should grow, not only for the growth itself but also to utilize the growth as the tool to improve the quality life of the people.

The writer is a technical advisor for Target MDGs

A short version of this article was published in the Jakarta Post, 15 January 2008.

Question for the young

Uki Bayu Sedjati

500 people are collecting rice remnants in restaurant-canteen-kioks in cities
2500 people dried rice remnants in winnowing trays
525000 people prepare un oiled frying pan
3937500 people heat dried rice on fire without oil or water
Everyone should one have two children, expected by the family planning program
7875000 children consume stale rice in Indonesia:

what do their parents consume then?
(They are ready to filled political party campaigners mouth with hot coal)


Poem “from the chronic hunger” February 14th , 2008

Sense of crisis is an indicator of one’s sensitivity on societal matters. It is regarded a sense because it involves with one’s feeling manifestation when it was touched, while crises is describing a situation that is unusual, uncommon, moreover an emergency situation. Thus, sense of crisis possibly be originated from feeling of affection, that is spontaneously connected to one’s cognition, then followed by psychomotoric responses. The quality of responses depends on the how close, how far, how extensive one experience on one condition is. What if the condition is about poverty, a problem that is regarded as an ancient, latent, and also actual problem?

Poverty rate is one nation measurement for it successfulness in providing welfare to its citizens. From the poverty perspective, if the poor are increasing, it is very clear that is has become a latent problem, and therefore data as well as problems and its solution should be dynamic, to keep up with the changes. Is it possible for the society’s sensitivity level could evolve along with the increasing of poor people?

When reading various work plans – from the government and non goverment side – the on paper concept does presents lots of possibilities. That means anything could be accomplished, postponed, or even cancelled. Each one of this possibilities has its own concequences, ofcourse. This is the place where sensitivity is trained. The higher the sensitivity is, the higher the realization possibilty be, as an idiom says: better be late than never. And if it failed, the feeling of failure could mount. Because all work plan will give an effect on the number of poor people along with their problems. Is that so?

Does the goverment official and the NGO activists have the chance to constantly, continuously, give all their live and effort to discuss, plans and do their best to prospere the poor as planned. Or is it enough to provide one third of their live? The other one third of their live is for propering their own nuclear family: wife/husband, children and grand childrens, or even bigger family circle: relative from the father or mother side, and so forth. The last one third is for funding leisure, gratifying people who helped accomplishing a plan, etc.

This question is similiar to the question that was brought up by one or two experts on what is the definition for middle class? My answer is: In Indonesia, just observe the activities in the supermarket or mall. The stand owner and the buyers, thousands in numbers from day to day basis, is a small part of indonesia’s middle class. So does the young, who enjoys education at some school/ university/ elite academy, even those who are rejoicing in night clubs or cafes—metropolitan way of life. Where are thier sources coming from?

This life style does select the scope of social interaction becoming a more exclusive one, filter the subject for discussion, that made the sense of crisis dull. Even if they do social activies: so called charity – it just no more than just giving a supervisial or cosmetics effects on their good image in the society. The life style of the middle class are in contradiction with those who are living in poverty.

It is clear, the effort to neutralize this contradiction is not an easy task. Yes, there is a contradiction between the hope to sharpen the sensitivity for the poor through middle class life style. Like young people who drove an expensive car equipped with air condition, television, stereo set, and snacking while at the same time seeing beggars struggle for rice and the marginalized queuing for kerosene. Straightaway, they talked and typed project proposal using sophisticated laptop.  

In a proposal, usually written this figures, among others there are:

The number of poor people:

a. Macro statistics: the ratio of people who is living under the poverty line in 2005 increased from 35,1 million (15,97%) becoming 39, 05 million (17,75%) in march 2006.

b. micro statistics: the number of poor householdsin 2005 is 19,1 million, comprised of 3,9 million chronic poor, 8,2 million poor, and 7 million are near poor.

Also systematic literatur study that are accordance with scientific method. Such as: research focus for empowering the poor, are based on conseptual frame work and measurement methodology which no longer sees poor people as those who dont have anything, but as those who has potentials – no matter how small it might be – that could be utilized to alleviate their own poverty.

The empowerment strategy could be done through these three approaches:

• Micro (empowering the poor individually through guidance, counseling, stress management, and crisis intervention),

• Mezzo (group based empowerment as a tool for intervention, education and training),

• Macro ( large systemic approach because the transformation are directed for a bigger societal scope)

• And so forth, completed with its ++ budget plan (read plus plus, in the same manner as how it is written in five star hotel commercial)

Is there a hope that there are still sensitive for poverty, responding with concrete action, comprehensively and continuously, did not regard them as an object for generating money? This is a question not a justification to judge people. This question is to awake our consciousness and minds, particularly young generation for filling Indonesia national awakening for another 100 years.  

The writer is a culture and social observer.