Lifting the poor from the yoke of poverty

Ivy Susanti, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Seven years ago, the government initiated a multimillion dollar biodiversity conservation project on Siberut island in West Sumatra, with strong financial support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The project in the Siberut national park has ended, but it is interesting to examine the fruitless effort on the part of the government to introduce a market economy to local people, mostly Mentawaians and a small number of migrants dominated by Minangkabaus.

The director of Environmental and Developmental Programs at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Gerard A. Persoon, writes in the January 2001 edition of Antropologi Indonesia, a journal produced by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Indonesia, that the Mentawaians are autonomous political units who earn their living from hunting, fishing and gathering. Their basic food staple is sago starch, which is harvested from the sagopalm they grow near the banks of rivers or small lakes.

He noted that the Mentawaians live in a subsistence economy, and they all have access to forest resources. They domesticate pigs and chickens and let the animals roam in the forest, which also has religious meanings for the locals.

The pigs also have become status symbols, as well as the local currency for dowries and to pay fines. Because of their importance, the pigs are fed additional raw sago.

Persoon, who has conducted research on the island since 1979, noted that in the early 1990s the government had issued plans to change the way of life on Siberut, partly because it was regarded as exploitation of the natural resources.

He quoted a 1992 document from the Ministry of Forestry, that said "the agriculture on Siberut is backward, and the people are too dependent on nature".

This document was followed by efforts to change the subsistence economy, including resettling the local people as part of the nationwide program for the "development and civilization of the isolated communities", which was launched by the social affairs ministry. The aim of this program, he said, was to "take the people into the mainstream of Indonesian social and economic life".

"An important element of this development program is to stimulate the cultivation of rice in the swamps. This is mainly done in order to replace sago, which is thought to be an inferior kind of food, with rice," Persoon wrote.

He said the government also tried to introduce various livestock to the island, such as goats, cows, water buffaloes and ducks, because the government considered keeping pigs "a bad habit".

Persoon did not record any resistance to the government initiative, but he said that it had not proved very successful. He observed that the rice fields had turned back into swamps, resettlement villages were abandoned and the livestock were killed or incorporated into the "pig model" of domestication.

Though he did also note that some of the people moved to the coastal zone and become more market and cash crop oriented.

This case, and other efforts to supplant subsistence economies in various areas, may have been insignificant while the country's economy was enjoying substantial growth in the 1980s and the early 1990s.

But when rice prices fluctuate and the economy is not growing, the people involved in these projects begin to suffer.

In November, the World Bank released a startling report about poverty in Indonesia. According to this report, nearly 60 percent of the population (over 120 million people) can be categorized as either very poor or "near poor". Most of the poor live in rural areas.

The World Bank stated that officially Indonesia's poverty rate declined in 2000, thanks to rising income and falling rice prices. The poverty rate fell from its peak of 27 percent of the population, or 56 million people, in 1999 to around 15.2 percent in 2000, as measured in terms of the minimum caloric intake a person needs to survive.

The report said, however, that, using the 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, which are based on income or consumption levels, 58 percent of the population, or 121 million people, lived on less than US$2 a day in 2000. While most of these people are not necessarily poor, they are very vulnerable.

Donations from outside the country have poured in for years as expressions of sympathy for the plight of the poor. But activists have accused the government of mismanaging the funds, saying that for most people in the government, poverty is seen more as a "project" through which they have the opportunity to enrich themselves, rather than a problem.

The issue of corruption is also rampant in Indonesia to the point that the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) has attached a string to part of its $3.14 billion in aid: The disbursement of the money is subject to the government showing progress on both the poverty and corruption fronts.

The government has also been accused of not providing support for villagers, who these critics feel should be receiving training and management skills to allow them to start their own small enterprises.

So, where are the poor heading to? And if we don't know where the government will take them, why don't we return to the starting point and revive efforts to help them?

The World Bank has defined poverty as -- among others -- powerlessness and a lack of representation and freedom, which is a typical capitalist view.

But the Siberut project shows us that the Mentawaians were basically not poor. A subsistence economy, which is also practiced in some areas in eastern Indonesia, assures people of receiving the food necessary for their daily consumption, even though it does not qualify as a market economy because of the absence of income (but is an excessive income really important if people become less consumptive?)

Teachers, medics and military officers deployed to the country's least-developed villages tell of receiving crops instead of money for their services, and some of them still feel honored by the villagers' generosity.

Thus, who can say that "poor" people can't pay for education, health services and security? They just use a different kind of currency than money.

So if some Indonesians, who we regard as poor, can live in a subsistence economy, it is better for the government to initiate an alternative market with all the infrastructure, which authorizes a group of people to exchange goods and services without using banknotes as the means for payment. Or the government may introduce a new currency to support this model.

Such trade may be old-fashioned, but it can also minimize the costs inflicted by corruption and end the influx of migrants to big cities. In many cases, these migrants and refugees have helped create urban poverty.

The World Bank has sounded the alarm about poverty in the country, but the Indonesian government can employ the above model to cut its financial dependence on aid donors by finding a solution to poverty at the grassroots level.