Indonesia's poor protest manipulation of poverty statistics as more than 100 million live on less than $2 a day

Jakarta, August 15, 2008: About 3000 people, many of them women and children from the city's burgeoning urban poor shanty towns organised by the Poor People's Union (Serikat Rakyat Miskin Indonesia - SRMI), held a protest outside the Bureau of Statistics and the Department of Social Affairs in Jakarta to protest official reports about the poverty rate which, they charged, were "clearly very different to the facts in the field". According to UN estimates, nearly half the country's population of 220 million people lives on less than US$2 a day.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) had boasted the same day in his annual address at Parliament ahead of Independence Day (August 17) that the country's poverty rate has decreased from 17.7% in 2006 to 15.4% in March 2008. "The poverty figure in 2008 is the lowest ever," he said. This reduction was resulted by the government move of alleviating poverty recently, the President claimed. SBY's popularity dived after he hiked fuel prices in May, badly hurting millions of people who live on $2 a day or less.

SBY argued that if he won a second five-year term in the 2009 elections, he could continue the job of tackling the nation's main impediments to even better growth, including crumbling infrastructure and widespread corruption.

These latest statistics are very inaccurate, said SRMI leaders who have organised many protests over fuel price hikes which have hit Indonesia's struggling poor very badly.
Protest organisers said that the poor communities were very angry at the government's manipulation of statistics and persistent lying about their fate. Placards carried branded the bureau of statistics and the government "liars", and declared that the numbers of poor were growing. They demanded that the government repudiate the foreign debt and nationalise the foreign mining and oil companies to improve the welfare of the poor.

In July an independent study, reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs showed that the numbers of poor had risen since the fuel price hike which caused higher prices of essential commodities and transport.

In that report, the number of poor people in Indonesia was expected to reach 41 million from 37 million last year, Latif Adam, an economist at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences was quoted as predicting. And that was according to the Indonesian official poverty line. Nearly half the country's population of 220 million people lives on less than $2 a day, the standard international measure of poverty.

"Obviously with the rising [consumer] prices that followed the fuel price hike, people who were in the near-poor category have become poor," he told IRIN News.

Source: Berdikarionline,Metro TV News (Indonesia), IRIN News, Antara news