Drought Threatens Indonesia's Rural Poor
12/1/97
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Title: Drought Threatens Indonesia's Rural Poor
Source: Pujung Journal
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 12/1/97
Byline: Seth Mydans
PUJUNG, Indonesia -- It was 4 a.m. on a hot, still night not long ago in this
tiny farming village when Murtinah was awakened by an almost-forgotten sound
on her red tile roof.
"It's raining," she said to her 7-year-old son, Puput, who was sleeping beside
her. It had been nine months since she had heard rain -- the worst drought
Indonesia has suffered in 50 years.
Mrs. Murtinah, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, hurried into the
darkness outside to feel the cool raindrops. She fed her two goats and placed a
clay pot beneath the eaves to catch the runoff from the roof.
"Then I went back inside and held my child in case he was frightened by the
sound of the rain," she said. "I was very happy."
But when she woke again, the sun was as hot and the ground was as dry as ever.
The water in her clay pot was too thick with silt to drink. Once again, Mrs.
Murtinah is waiting for rain.
Although rain showers have begun fitfully in some areas of this broad
archipelago after a two-month delay, the terraced rice fields here in central
Java remain barren. Officials say that as soon as clouds appear in the sky,
they will begin seeding them for rain.
Heavy showers have come to the northern islands of Borneo and Sumatra, dousing
the vast forest fires that have blanketed parts of seven nations with a murky
haze. And the monsoon has finally arrived in Malaysia and Singapore, the
nations that suffered the most from the smoke.
To the east, in Australia, however, the drought continues and lightning has
ignited huge wildfires that are raging across the outback.
A product of the El Nino weather disturbance that has brought climatic
turbulence to Pacific region, the drought has caused wide-ranging crop
failures, disease and death to parts of Indonesia.
It has heightened the effects of the regional economic crisis in Indonesia,
where bank closings, rising prices and unemployment are raising fears of social
unrest.
Indonesia's rice crop has been severely damaged, as have its plantations of
palm, coffee, cocoa and other crops. In the remote eastern province of Irian
Jaya, the drought has brought widespread hunger, an epidemic of diarrhea from
filthy water, and hundreds of deaths.
Even as urban workers lose their jobs by the tens of thousands, newspapers say
as many as 1,000 rural people a day have fled the drought for the capital city
of Jakarta.
"If the drought continues, it will affect most severely the rural areas,
especially the rural poor," said Dennis de Tray, the World Bank representative
in Jakarta. "The natural safety valve is to move to the cities to look for
employment, but that is not going to be nearly as effective as in normal times.
So the concerns about the rural poor and the urban poor over the next couple or
three years are very legitimate."
Experts say the coming rains could bring a new disaster, with floods expected
in broad areas denuded of vegetation by the drought and the forest fires.
For many farmers in central Java, water has become more precious than gold.
People have cashed in their small savings of gold and sold their livestock to
buy water. Mrs. Murtinah's family sold one of its goats to buy feed for the two
that remain.
Others have sold their cows and water buffalo, their most prized possessions.
Government water tankers drive through the countryside, but their supply is
limited: just two buckets - or 10.5 gallons -- for each family each week.
The poorest villagers, who cannot afford to buy more from private water
sellers, subsist on just those two buckets. Some cut and sell firewood for the
equivalent of about 60 cents a day to buy a bucket or two more.
For miles around, impeccably terraced rice fields lie brown and dry -- tilled,
seeded and waiting for rain. If the rains are delayed much longer, the farmers
here say the seeds will begin to die and their year's one harvest will be lost.
This area, the Guning Kidul district about 30 miles southeast of the city of
Jogjakarta, is one of the driest on the nation's main island of Java. "We are
just waiting," said Mrs. Murtinah's husband, Hadi Suyono. "Normally all of
those fields would be green."
Hadi is a puppet master in the Indonesian shadow plays called wayang and he
said that during his performances he now counsels audiences to be patient in
their suffering.
"This is a trial from God," Hadi said. "God is testing us. Many people are
walking in darkness rather than walking in light. The world is filled with
greed."
He acknowledged that government aid has been better than it was in a lesser
drought in the early 1960s, when starving people abandoned their villages in
search of food and water and rats ate their dying crops.
But in a comment that reflects a generalized discontent among much of the
country's population, he said villagers still feel abandoned by government
officials.
"We can't say it openly," he said, "but most people feel inside their hearts
that the country has gone off the rails."