WFP to feed 2.1 million Indonesians

Agence France-Presse, Jakarta

The United Nations food agency on Monday launched a program to feed 2.1 million of the poorest Indonesians, including hundreds of thousands of people displaced by sectarian and separatist violence.

The operation by the World Food Program (WFP) will cost US$65 million and run until the end of 2003, the organization said.

The program is aimed at 2.1 million Indonesians who face the highest risk of hunger and malnutrition because of the rising costs of food and other commodities, the WFP said in a statement.

The relief operation will enable the 1.5 million urban poor to buy subsidized rice at a fraction of the normal price.

WFP will also give rice to 300,000 internally displaced people throughout the archipelago as well as blended food, a vital nutritional supplement, to children aged under two years and their mothers.

"The operation is designed to solve at least one problem for these people -- getting just enough to eat -- so they can grapple more effectively with serious setbacks of poverty, unemployment and poor health," said WFP country director Mohamed Saleheen in the statement.

"We know, for example, that in the four major cities where we work, half of the children under five years of age are stunted and 30 percent are underweight.

"This is the result of acute and widespread malnutrition and we need to short-circuit it now so that it is not passed on to the next generation," Saleheen said.

He said unskilled urban laborers in Indonesia earned half what they did before the regional crisis struck in mid-1997 and crippled the economy.

In addition, Saleheen said, many in WFP's target group had no access to government social safety nets because they were illegal settlers.

A recent WFP study showed the number of poor people among the internally displaced Indonesians was about three times higher than the overall average of 19 percent at district level.

"The IDP (internally displaced people) wave has risen in just the last three years," said Saleheen. "That means that we still have an opportunity to fix these problems before they harden into a second generation."

Indonesia was beset by sectarian and separatist unrests following the end of the 32-year autocratic rule of Soeharto in May 1998. An estimated 1.3 million people are internal refugees.