Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
While food aid for disaster relief has, tragically, become somewhat routine in In-
donesia in recent years, with natural disasters suh as the Indian Ocean tsunami, the
Yogyakarta and Nias Island earthquakes, and the 2010 volcanic eruption of Mt Mer-
api, reports of famine and severe malnutrition unrelated to suh events continue to
cause great concern. In late 2009, for example, reports from Papua emerged of 113
deaths in Yahukimo District due to hunger and associated diseases when the local
sweet potato harvest failed (AHRC, 2009). In the Yahukimo case, despite initial gov-
ernment denials that lak of food led to the deaths, it became apparent that failures
in broader food security institutions were indeed to blame. Elsewhere in Indonesia,
urban poverty and the hronic inability of the poor to aford basic foods have res-
ulted in what some claim to be an epidemic of 'hidden hunger'. Newspaper reports
from South Sulawesi suggested that over a two-month period in 2008, there were ten
infant deaths from hunger and 94 other cases of acute malnutrition in the provincial
capital of Makassar (Hajramurni, 2008).
Causes of severe hunger are clearly diverse and defy simple categorization or lin-
ear associations. It is therefore somewhat disturbing to observe policy formulation
occurring based on assumptions that a direct relationship exists between food avail-
