Prioritizing poverty

The babies could not wait -- they died before our honorable legislators were able to complete their ongoing revision of the state budget, which would then determine the figures of "compensation funds" to the poor, derived from funds earlier used to subsidize motorists.

Many more are dying, and neither will they be able to wait for the government's other plan -- to help poor regions diversify their crops -- a way to increase farming family incomes. Alwi Shihab, the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare, mentioned the plan late last month following the reports of hundreds of severely malnourished children in East Nusa Tenggara and other areas.

Alwi assured us that the government took the reports seriously. He spoke of "accidents" occurring in a few cases like the deaths of a number of infants in West Nusa Tenggara. "It wasn't because of neglect," he said, explaining that the infants who still needed hospital treatment were brought home by their parents who could no longer afford the hospital costs.

The bizarre remarks of our minister (who also said he was the only hungry person he met when he visited tsunami-struck Aceh) we hope do not reflect the views of the rest of Cabinet. But his solution -- the government's farm diversity plan -- poses serious questions about the government's strategy to prevent more deaths from malnutrition and, more generally, to overcome poverty.

The faces of poverty -- the starving babies, the infants struck down by polio, and according to Monday's report on child labor, the millions missing school -- are dawning upon us as we watch the gradual progress of the new government's policies.

Reducing poverty was one of these policies, and the mantra hammered into us has been in the form of a trickle-down theory -- raising economic growth by luring investment so as to be able to create more jobs and benefit the poor and downtrodden.

Which sounds fine, at least in theory, except that it does not detail what policies are addressing the millions of desperately poor families whose children are hungry, sick and illiterate right now; before they can rely on all that promising new investment and those new jobs. Cabinet ministers have pointed to the compensation funds earmarked to the poor; the profits from the elimination of the fuel subsidies. These funds, they acknowledge, will only go to the poorest of Indonesians -- not to those living above the poverty line on insecure incomes -- but even they admit that the most at-risk groups are unlikely to receive such packages any time soon.

The health experts tell us what we have missed and what we need to do. Others remind us of the "good-old days" when president Soeharto ensured the existence of the nationwide integrated health service posts.

Most are in agreement of the urgent need to place poverty eradication at the center of policies at both the national and regional levels.

Emaciation and conditions like marasmus and polio do not happen overnight. Whatever the regional leaders' and local bodies responses were to official reports (if there were any), they were clearly inadequate. Like those in Jakarta, important government officials were probably busy trying to lure investment into their areas, not to mention tending to their own "investments".

Making poverty central to a government program should never mean leaving the issue to just one or two ministers, a habit that has continued from the past. The wise men and women working with President Susilo Bambang Yudhyono would also do well to take a serious look at the United Nations guidelines on addressing poverty, part of the Millennium Development Goals to which Indonesia is a signatory.

This year's report -- The State of the World's Children -- reminds us that it is not merely family income that needs to be addressed when it comes to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. Understanding "how children experience poverty" and how this continued poverty helps rob a country of an important resource -- an educated workforce -- is one basis for necessary action, along with "pursuing labor market and fiscal policies that address economic insecurity among women".

Finally, there are the important short-term measures that are often overlooked by seemingly far-sighted government officials -- ensuring systems are in place that protect the most at-risk groups, so that their children do not die because their parents have no money to save them.

If our leaders understood this, they would know there was no way that the deaths of little Yosli Amanunut and all the others were "accidents."