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)