A human right perspective about hunger in Indonesia

A human right perspective about hunger in Indonesia

Sudirman Nasir, Victoria

The hundreds of children suffering from chronic malnutrition
in West and East Nusa Tenggara, Lampung and West Sumatra should
be considered just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other
children in remote rural areas or in urban slums in Indonesia who
are likely to be ill with symptoms of malnutrition that go
unreported because their parents lack access to adequate
treatment and prevention programs.

It has become apparent that malnutrition is not merely a
public health problem. The root causes of malnutrition are
poverty, social deprivation, state neglect, official ignorance
and people's lack of access to social services, particularly the
fulfillment of their basic needs and fundamental rights to food,
health and education.

Malnutrition is definitely a socio-economic and political
problem and it is also a human rights problem. The Presidential
Commission on Hunger (1980), a commission of the United Nations,
outlines it thus: "Whether one speaks of human rights or basic
human needs, the right to food is the most basic of all. Unless
that right is first fulfilled, the protection of other human
rights becomes a mockery for those who must spend all their
energy merely to maintain life itself".

The human rights aspect of malnutrition should be taken into
account since we can never solve malnutrition problems as long as
we treat them merely as health or medical problems. A human
rights perspective, which links malnutrition with health, socio-
economic and political problems, should also stimulate the need
for a multidisciplinary and multi-sector approach to overcome
malnutrition.

This perspective suggests how to solve and reduce malnutrition
by overcoming its root causes. Poverty alleviation, social and
economic development, and the state's responsibility to create a
good government that works to fulfill the basic needs of its
people are prerequisites to win the war against hunger and
sickness.

Furthermore, combating malnutrition should be a strategic part
of our efforts to increase people's quality of life since
malnutrition has long and even intergenerational effects. Chronic
malnutrition, which leads to diseases like kwashiorkor, marasmus
and marasmic-kwashiorkor in children, has severe biological and
psychosocial consequences, retarding mental and physical
development.

It is also clear that without prompt treatment and sustainable
prevention programs, malnutrition can cause premature death. Even
if those chronically malnourished children can survive and reach
adulthood, they may endure many psycho-social disturbances and
can transmit weak genes to their offspring.

Many studies indicate that children of chronically
malnourished parents (especially mothers) have greater risk of
suffering from diabetes (type 2), cardiovascular diseases and
many kinds of cancers. This is the so-called the proof of the
"Baker hypothesis" that explains the foetal origin of diseases
(Siddiq Osmani and Amartya Sen, The Hidden Penalties of Gender
Inequality: Foetal Origins of Ill-Health, Journal of Economic and
Human Biology, I, page 105-121, 2003).

Taking a human rights perspective it is obvious that
malnutrition among children can create lost generations, which
can risk the future of an entire people or nation.

Since children and women are the most vulnerable to
malnutrition, their human rights need to be taken the most
seriously. It is also clear that the state needs to take the main
responsibility of ensuring these groups have access to food and
nutrition.

Community development programs to enable parents to provide
sufficient food for their children, to educate and facilitate
parents to maintain good hygiene and sanitation for their
families as a way of preventing infectious diseases, and to
improve access to strategic social services such as health and
education, are essential.

The Indonesian government has addressed the rights to food in
the explanation of Law No. 7 on health (1996), which states that
eating food is a basic human right of every person in Indonesia
and should be guaranteed and available for all.

In addition, the Indonesian government has ratified the
Convention on Children's Rights that address the government's
obligation to fulfill children's rights of protection, rights of
survival, rights of development and rights of participation.
Children's rights to sufficient food, education and health are
definitely important in this convention.

However, the malnutrition illnesses among children in many
provinces in Indonesia that occur nearly every year show that
there are wide discrepancies between what is written in the many
laws and conventions and the reality.

Depressing but unsurprising was the Minister of Health Siti
Fadilah and Coordinating Minister of the People's Welfare Alwi
Shihab's response to the issue. Saying how shocked they were that
an outbreak of malnutrition could occur in a rice-surplus area
like Mataram, they gave the impression that the outbreak was an
accident or some kind of isolated incident. Such naive statements
show the over-simplistic views many important officials have of
what is a complex and reoccuring problem.

It also shows how difficult it is to promote human rights
concepts among elected officials. The mentality of Indonesia's
leaders in government and the legislature will have to change
before they are to understand the multifaceted nature of
malnutrition problems or how they are retarding this country.
Such a comprehensive understanding is the basic requirement to
creating appropriate policies and programs to overcome the root
causes of malnutrition.

To help educate our leaders, Indonesia's civil society
elements -- NGOs, academics and the media -- need to stress the
urgency and importance of human rights to food and basic
nutrition.

They must also highlight cases of malnutrition as the product
of a state's neglect of these basic rights -- and hard evidence
that politicians and officials do not care about the welfare of
the people and are ignorant of their proper role in society.

The writer is a postgraduate student at the Key Centre for
Women's Health in Society at the School of Population Health in
the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at
s.nasir@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au