Andrew Higgins, West Java – Wood huts scattered around fields of rice are a long way from the haggling between the International Monetary Fund and the technocrats of President Soeharto.

Here villagers have no electricity and only small battery-powered radios to convey news of Asia's economic turmoil. They did not need the radio to tell them something was seriously wrong. The abstractions of economists had already taken brutal form: the body of a young mother.

Villagers blame the death on a crude birth control device - a cheap substitute for the injections and other forms of family planning that are now too expensive. No one else had fallen ill, but village women want to get out of the Government's birth control program.

The collapse of the national currency, the rupiah, against the dollar and the colossal debts of corporations are undermining the lives of ordinary Indonesians. The twin pillars of President Soeharto's legitimacy as Father of Development – adequate food supplies and birth control to limit the number of new mouths to be fed – are crumbling.

Most of Indonesia's 202 million people have never seen a dollar and are baffled by billboards saying "I love the rupiah". Nonetheless, all have fallen victim to a global economy guided by forces they neither see nor understand. The soybeans that provide a national staple known as tempe are mostly imported, as are contraceptives and drugs.

"We don't know what they are talking about when they talk about the monetary crisis. All we know is that prices keep going up," said Ii Tazkiyah Tawfi, a village teacher and family planning counsellor. "Officials talk about getting rid of poverty. But they talk about it sitting in air-conditioned rooms or fancy cars. They do not know what it is like to live like this."

The United Nations has warned that at least 7.5 million people could soon face food shortages, reporting that many already suffer an acute lack of supply. Most at risk are remote areas hit by the worst drought in decades, such as Irian Jaya and parts of Borneo.

Even on Java, the country's rich agricultural heartland, many are hungry because they cannot afford basic imported foodstuffs. President Soeharto has acknowledged the pain, but resisted reform of a state food import agency that enriches his youngest son, Tommy, and various cronies. In a statement last week, he said: "Even mothers can no longer be provided with powdered milk for their babies."

In the meantime, Indonesia's state family planning agency, architect of one of the world's most successful birth control campaigns, is running out of supplies to prevent a population explosion. Many women are deserting the program because charges are now too high.

Private organisations that once filled gaps left by the state can offer little help. The Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association has stopped ordering depo-provera, a widely used birth control drug, after yet another price rise last week.

Lies Marcos-Natsin, coordinator of an Islamic organisation involved in family planning, said domestic abuse was rising because women who can no longer afford contraception try to control the timing of sex. "They want to control their bodies, but their husbands don't have any patience. For women, sex is seen as a duty. They have no right to refuse. They don't want to have any more babies, but they have no choice."

Abortion is illegal but widespread. Trained doctors are too expensive, so many women resort to dukuns, traditional healers who try to induce miscarriage through a potent and sometimes dangerous mix of herbs and wine. The woman who died in the village near Pandeglang may have been the victim of a botched termination, though friends insist she was killed by the new birth control method.