Lifting the poor from the yoke of poverty

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.