Paper crisis threatens education

Paper crisis threatens education

SEMARANG, Central Java (JP): Two senior academics warned
yesterday that the nation's painstaking efforts to promote
education were threatened by the current paper crisis.

Darmanto Jatman and Soegito Soedrajat, both from Semarang's
Diponegoro University, also told The Jakarta Post that the
government should find out why the crisis came on so suddenly.

Darmanto said the severe shortage of newsprint was deplorable,
coming, as it does, shortly after the government launched a
national campaign promoting the virtues of reading.

"It is only appropriate to call the predicament cultural
sabotage," he said.

The paper crisis, particularly acute in the case of newsprint,
has caused book prices to soar and is threatening to cause
numerous small newspapers in the provinces, faced with
skyrocketing production costs, to close.

Paper producers have washed their hands off the problem,
saying that they are supplying paper to the market as usual. That
claim has been supported by Minister of Industry Tunky Ariwibowo.

Darmanto said that the ruling Golkar party was gambling when
it formed a special team to investigate the paper crisis and
bring the prices down.

"If the prices do go down, Golkar cannot claim success for
itself because Golkar is not the only one seeking to end the
crisis. But if it fails, Golkar may lose face," he said.

Soegito Sudradjat blamed the government's slack supervision of
paper distribution for the crisis. "If the problem is not solved
properly soon, it will damage the government's reputation with
the public," he said.

He said he doubted the truth of the claims that the paper
shortage was due to the steep increases in demand for newsprint,
attributed to newspapers' adding extra pages.

"Why, then, has the crisis occurred so suddenly?" he asked. He
added that paper producers surely knew very well how many
publishers they supplied.

He warned that paper was more important than cement, adding
that the oligopolistic production and distribution of cement
allowed speculation that often caused the commodity to disappear
from the market until the government raised the prices.

"Cement shortages may cause the postponement of development
projects, but paper shortages undermine the vital process of
education," he said.

He urged the government to tighten its control over the
distribution of paper.

Meanwhile, a student activist of Soedirman University in
Purwokerto, Central Java, told the Post that eight campus
newsletters there had stopped publishing this month due to the
paper crisis.

"We decided to stop publication because price of paper has
risen by 150 percent. We can't afford to buy it," Undang Sudrajat
said.

He said newsletters at other universities in Central Java,
including Gadjah Mada, Diponegoro, Sebelas Maret, Satya Wacana
and Sugiya Pranata, had also had to close down.

"Student activists are very concerned about these
developments," he said.

A senior editor of Suara Merdeka, Central Java's largest-
circulation daily newspaper, said that the newspaper may have to
reduce its pages from 20 to 18 if the problem continues.
(har/wah/rms)