City to provide food for poor children

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.