Flight from poverty

If it was meant to be a wake up call, it failed to arouse even the slightest interest of the nation. A World Bank report about the state of poverty in Indonesia, and why it must be urgently addressed, was not alarming enough to prompt us to act.

That nearly 60 percent of the population -- or over 120 million people -- in this country are either very poor or are "near poor" barely grabbed national attention. The report received a brief mention, mostly only in passing, by some media, as it was largely eclipsed by the political intricacies of the Annual Session of the People's Consultative Assembly.

The World Bank report was presented to the annual meeting of the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI), which brought together the country's major aid donor countries and lending agencies, in Jakarta. It picked poverty as the chief theme as the group discussed Jakarta's aid needs for the coming year. When the CGI decided that Indonesia should get US$3.14 billion, the message that rampant poverty was undermining Indonesia's future either got lost, or was simply, and conveniently, ignored.

The World Bank's message was strong enough for our donor countries and agencies to generously fork out more money, but apparently not for the recipient government to push poverty alleviation to the forefront of the national agenda.

The World Bank acknowledges that officially, Indonesia's poverty rate fell in 2000, thanks to moderate economic recovery and falling rice prices. By last year, "only" 15.2 percent of the population, or 32 million people, as against 27 percent in 1999, lived below the official poverty line, which is measured in terms of a minimum calorie intake a person needs to subsist.

The report however said that, using a more widely used international measure, some 58 percent of the population, or 121 million people, lived on less than $2 a day. While most are not necessarily poor, they are very vulnerable. Another crisis, not an unlikely prospect with the slowing down of the global economy, would quickly plunge them back into abject poverty, just as it did in 1998-1999, the report said.

The World Bank stated that the sustainability of Indonesia's economic recovery hinged on the government's ability to lift more of its people out of poverty. The report called for greater efforts in ensuring access to basic services such as education and health for the poor, and for the elimination of what it called "anti-poor" government policies.

Many people who have been quietly but actively working on the front line in the war against poverty could not agree more with the warnings of the grave consequences for Indonesia if it fails to address the problem of poverty.

There is the tremendous loss in terms of national productivity. There is the danger of Indonesia losing even a second generation of children (everyone agrees the 1997-1999 economic crisis had already cost the nation virtually an entire generation). There is the threat of the nation falling further behind in the increasingly competitive global economy; and since poverty breeds crime, there is the threat to security, and consequently the threat of a break down of law and order. This in turn will deter investors from coming to Indonesia. Thus, Indonesia could be condemned to a vicious cycle of poverty.

Poverty has never been a favorite topic for this nation. It is something that we would rather not talk about. The last time poverty became a major national issue was in 1998 at the height of the economic crisis. And that was chiefly for the wrong reason.

Donations poured in from outside Indonesia as expressions of sympathy for the plight of the poor. But for most people in the government, poverty was seen more as a "project", an opportunity to enrich themselves, than a problem. Projects entailed fat commissions and generous expenses for those handling the money. Money donated for the government's social safety net programs, intended to cushion the poor from the impact of the crisis, was heavily "taxed" by the handlers before it reached the intended recipients.

Corruption remains a major concern in Indonesia today to the point that the CGI has attached strings to part of its $3.14 billion aid: Its disbursement is subject to the government showing progress on both poverty and corruption fronts.

Since it is clear that the survival of this nation is at stake, we can no longer afford to ignore the problem of poverty. There can be no other agenda more important to Indonesia today than tackling poverty. But we can only do that if we admit that we have a problem, a grave one, in hand. It is time our nation started owning up to the problem and taking care of our poor.