City to provide food for poor children

Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Governor Sutiyoso announced on Friday that his administration would provide additional food for children from poor families in the city.

Sutiyoso, who has repeatedly denied the existence of chronic malnutrition in the capital, claimed that all starving children, regardless of whether their parents had a Jakarta identification card (ID) or not, would get some additional food.

"If necessary, we will use our reserve funds to improve the nutrition of children from poor families," the governor added.

The city has over Rp 800 billion (US$84.21 million) in reserve funds, which are usually used for emergency situations such as natural disasters. The administration is required to report the reserve fund use to the City Council.

Sutiyoso did not say what kind of additional food would be provided or which agency would carry out the program.

City Health Agency head Abdul Chalik Masulili said on Thursday that there were around 8,450 undernourished children in the capital, including one, a 2.5-year-old boy named Rahmatulloh of Penjaringan, North Jakarta, who is suffering a particularly extreme case. He is now confined to Koja Public Hospital in North Jakarta.

The agency also said there were more than 923,000 children under the age of five in the city, many of whom may be at risk.

Sutiyoso took the blame for the extreme malnutrition cases in the capital and vowed to take concrete measures to address the problem.

"If you ask who is responsible for (the malnutrition cases), we, the local authorities, must take the blame. But the most important thing is what can we do to overcome the problem," Sutiyoso said on Friday at City Hall.

Sutiyoso's statement was his first admission that there were malnutrition cases in the city.

Prior to that statement, he had repeatedly claimed that there were no malnourished children in the city thanks to the large amount of budget allocations for poor residents through various programs, such as subsidized rice and other food hand-out programs.

The governor stressed that the city administration would order all subdistrict heads to conduct a thorough registration of children in their respective areas.

He said that subdistrict officials, helped by heads of all neighborhood units, should record all malnutrition cases, including those whose parents were not holding valid Jakarta resident ID cards.

Usually, poor people, mostly migrants from Javanese and Sumatran villages, who do not hold Jakarta IDs are excluded from any poverty eradication program.

"Heads of neighborhood units should know the condition of their respective residents. Therefore, we hope that they will help subdistrict officials to record any cases of malnutrition in their territories," explained Sutiyoso.

The city had allocated over Rp 1 trillion from the city budget for helping poor families through various antipoverty programs, but many poor families have continually complained that they have never received a thing.

The city's 2005 budget stands at Rp 14.01 trillion.

The Jakarta Statistics Agency (BPS Jakarta) estimates that some 680 community units, or 25 percent of the total 2,657 community units are slums. The agency also reported in 2002 that there were 291,324 poor families in the city.

Malnutrition has suddenly become a popular subject for journalists and is in the national headlines recently after the 10 lethal cases in West Nusa Tenggara were made public. After that case shocked a lot of people, other cases later started getting reported on by journalists in other regions of the country.