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Indonesia Warns of World-Wide Famine

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Download The Indonesian government this week warned of a world-wide famine due to climate change and a growing population.

The comments were made during an International ministerial conference on food security in Bali.

As Esther de Jong reports food prices of stable items have soared in recent months.

 

It’s 8 o’clock in the morning at one of Jakarta’s largest wet markets.

Housewife Ani is here early to try and get a bargain.

But it’s not a good day. It’s all expensive and she buys less of everything...Particularly chilli peppers.

Going without is not an option, she says. The price of chilli soared 10-fold in recent months.

Seller Suharno says it’s the biggest price rise he’s seen in ten years.

“Almost everyone complains. They’re not mad, but they sure are not happy. My sales are down less but that’s part of the deal of being a vendor.”

The price of rice risen by as much as 30 percent in recent months.

Indonesia’s inflation has been above forecasts every month since November, forcing the central bank to raise interest rates in an attempt to cool prices.

The fishing industry too is struggling with irregular weather patterns.

In Marunda, a small fishing village close to Jakarta 8 year old Ika is squatting opening clams with a knife.

Her grandmother, Habibah stands beside her:

“My grandchild didn’t go to school because there is no money for transport. By opening these clams she earns the money herself.”

The fishermen here have not been able to go to sea for the last four months. The waves are too high and the winds too strong.

Their income has dropped more than a quarter in the past 12 months.

The wind whistles through fisherman Tiarom’s house. His family of six share one bedroom. Times are tough:

“The knowledge of the sea we received from our fathers is no longer accurate and we can’t use it.  It’s not only the wind, the waves, but also changes in the currents so the places where the fishers use to go have changed so we don’t know where to go. We have to learn again. We’re back to zero in terms of our knowledge.”

He started fishing when he was ten. Now he barely earns 50 dollars per month.

“Our grandparents used to tell us there were mangroves where they could collect shrimps and fish with their bare hands. The sand has disappeared, fish can’t breed...it’s caused us to suffer. The situation is man made. We used to have seven kinds of clam but only one now. Jakarta bay is small area, but that’s happening all over the country so that can create a lot of problems and contribute to the change of weather. I’m more than angry because we’ve tried everything but it’s really hard.”

To ease their pain the Indonesian government says it has handed out 60 million US dollars in development funds to regional governments to help fishermen and their families.

Tiarom dismisses such help.

And Bruce Wallner a agricultural specialists from the Australian Embassy also criticizes such an initiative:

“The FAO and others have been very keen to reduce and eliminate subsidies in the fishing sector, simply because it tends to not only produce inefficiency but it also tends to lead to overfishing. And there is large global concern about the state of the world fish stocks and I think Indonesia is lucky in having a bountiful ocean and being a very maritime sort of country with a lot of fish but they do need to be careful about  overexploitation and there are clear signs that they are overexploiting a number of stocks.”

Another one of the Indonesian president’s suggestions was for people to grow their own food items particularly chillies.

Bruce Wallner from the Australian Embassy in Jakarta likes the idea:

“It is probably not a bad suggestion because chillies you can grow on a small scale and you actually consume relatively small quantities at an individual level. So the home pot plant on the balcony is a short term solution. I think if you extent that thinking to large scale commodities such as rice and wheat and beef and soy obviously people can’t grow a field of those commodities, so while I think the president’s suggesting about chillies is an excellent one, I don’t think it is a general solution for food commodities on the whole.”

\Back at the market in Jakarta 52 year old Nuryani is pan-frying fish.

As a cook in one of the market’s restaurants she uses a lot of chilli peppers, but the recent price hike made her do something unthinkable:

“Use a little less chilli, use a little more tomato so that it’s not too expensive for us. The price of our food cannot go up, so it’s up to us to lower the cost so we use less chilli.”

Her costumers might not complain but Nuryani has a hard time cutting back on the pepper:

“Us sellers, what can we do? We have to put chilli. Without it, we lose our identity.”

Last Updated ( Monday, 28 March 2011 11:33 )  

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