Always with them

WHEN two scavengers died last week under a landslide at Jakarta's main rubbish dump, the extensive television coverage that resulted provided a too-rare glimpse into the plight of some of Indonesia's poorest people. And their ranks are swelling. After declining for six years the number of poor people has increased sharply. Some 39m, 18% of the population of 220m, are now officially poor, according to data just released by the government's statistics bureau, 4m more than in 2005.

AFP

Almost one in five

That the poverty level has stopped falling is no surprise. A 126% increase in fuel prices last October catapulted inflation to 18%, while wages increased only marginally. The number of poor Indonesians would have soared even more, to 51m according to the statistics office, if the government had not given cash handouts to some 76m people to cushion the effects of the fuel-price increase (which eliminated a costly subsidy). But activists are questioning the data. They argue that the figures fail to give the full alarming picture.

The Urban Poor Consortium believes, for example, that the number of people falling into poverty in Jakarta has risen by almost twice as much as the statisticians state. It also says that more people are, relatively speaking, even poorer than they were a year ago. Numerous academics echo their claims. This is partly because the government's definition of poverty—less money than is needed to afford a diet of 2,100 calories a day—is 152,847 rupiah ($16.80) a month. This measure is well below the more widely used benchmark of $1 a day. Using the $1-a-day measure, it is estimated that more than 80m Indonesians are in poverty.

Government officials admit their target, a poverty level of 8.2% by 2009, is anyway unattainable. The current economic growth rate of around 5% is insufficient to provide all new job-seekers with employment, let alone dent Indonesia's huge unemployment tally. Ministers did announce earlier this month an extra $1.4 billion for poverty alleviation in 2007, 18% up on 2006. This will be distributed through a community-empowerment programme, under which each village will be given up to $110,000 more than this year to create jobs in the way it deems best. The goal is 15m additional jobs within three years, with 12.5m of them coming through the village schemes and the rest from the development of the plantation industry.

Admirable though it is, this policy does not tackle the root cause of Indonesia's rising poverty. A report on the subject being prepared by the World Bank argues that artificially high rice prices are much more to blame than the effects of the fuel-price increase. This is because most poor people spend a quarter of their earnings on rice, which has risen in price by more than a third in the past year. Keeping domestic rice prices higher than international prices by severely limiting imports makes little sense, the World Bank argues. It claims that 75% of the poor earn their living from agriculture but that at least 75% of the poor are net rice consumers.

Even if rice prices were to plummet, other brakes on poverty alleviation remain. The government's unconditional cash handouts are scheduled to end in the third quarter of this year. Their complicated replacement, payments conditional on children remaining in education and meeting health targets, is unlikely to be ready till the middle of next year. Promised spending on infrastructure should pull some people out of poverty. But few government policies suggest that the national average education of less than seven years' schooling, a prime cause of poverty, will rise soon. For many Indonesians, the future remains pretty bleak.