Jakarta – As Indonesia sinks deeper into its worst economic crisis for decades, rice has increasingly become the favorite target of looters and robbers, reports said here Thursday.

In the Central Java district of Banyumans, farmers were now camping in their fields to prevent looters from snatching their rice harvest in the dark, the Jakarta Post daily said. Marauding groups, sometimes reaching 20 people, have been sighted in several districts along the southern coast of Central Java, harvesting rice in in the dead of the night, the daily said.

A farmer in Legok village, Banjarnegara district, said thieves had cleaned out his rice field one week before he planned to harvest it, taking away two tonnes of unhusked grain. Another farmer in the same village, said thieves had taken off with 22 sacks of freshly-cut unhusked rice that he had left to dry under the sun.

In the rice-producing island of Lombok, east of Bali, a mob intercepted trucks transporting rice and plundered them, the daily said.

In the district of Bondowoso in East Java earlier this month, scores of rice mills were attacked and rice, husked or unhusked, was taken. Newspapers have carried reports that in some cases, robbers forced mill employees to mill unhusked rice for them to carry away.

Indonesia is facing a crippling financial crisis which has brought the country's economy to its knees, pushing up prices of goods, including essentials, amid rising unemployment and poverty.

For many, the high price of rice has made the nation's staple food unaffordable and the UN World Food Program says many are surviving on one meal a day. The International Labor Organization (ILO) warned Monday that the crisis was likely to drive two out of every three citizens below the poverty line next year. The UN Food and Agriculture Organizaton (FAO) has estimated that more than 7.5 million Indonesians were likely to experience "acute household food shortages" during the next 12 months.