Mariel Grazella, Jakarta – Poverty left no options for six siblings but to consume a cheap traditional meal made of processed cassava mixed with palm sugar, called tiwul, which led to lethal food poisoning that claimed their lives over the weekend in Jebol village in Jepara, Central Java.
"The first to die were Lutfiana, 22, and Abdul Amin, 3, who passed away at Kartini General Hospital in Jepara on Sunday morning and Sunday evening," Jamhamid, the children's father, was quoted as saying by news portal tribunnews.com.
Lutfiana and Abdul Amin were buried along with Jamhamid's other children who died eating the meal: Ahmad Kusrianto, 5, Saidatul Kusniah, 8, Ahmad Hisyam Ali, 13, and Faridatul Solihah, 15.
Jamhamid, who works as a tailor in nearby Semarang, said his family ate cassava because that was all they could afford on his paltry weekly income of Rp 150,000 (US$16.60), which he stretched over four days.
Jamhamid's income is higher than the official poverty line set by the Indonesian government between March 2009 and March 2010 at Rp 211,726 per month to fulfill a 2100-calorie daily intake.
"Sometimes we can only buy 10 kilograms of rice instead of the usual 16 kilograms to feed eight members of the family," Jamhamid said. His wife, Siti, added that the family had been subsisting on cassava for two weeks because of the financial restraints they suffered from.
Jamhamid and Siti's six children died just days after Coordinating Public Welfare Minister Agung Laksono announced that the country experienced a decline in poverty, adding that the government aimed to further reduce poverty to 12 percent or less in 2012.
The official poverty rate fell from 16.7 percent of the total population in 2004 to 13.3 percent of the total population in 2010, he said.
The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) reported that as of March 2010, 31.02 million Indonesians lived below the poverty line, 1.5 million less than the 32.53 million people recorded as living in poverty in the same month in 2009.
However, Gadjah Mada University economist Revrisond Baswir said a gap between the data and reality existed, reflecting the government's effort to "lie through statistics".
"The government uses politically driven statistical variables and this is what causes the gap with reality," he said, adding that this method helped the government manipulate reality by hiding undesirable facts.
"If the government were to use the World Bank's definition of poverty, setting the poverty line at $2 per day, the actual number of poor people would skyrocket," he said.
The BPS previously scoffed at the World Bank, which reported that 100 million Indonesians lived in poverty, defining poverty as living on $2 or less per day.
Economist Aviliani said the poverty line should be periodically adjusted according to inflation. She added that the government would fail to accurately respond to real conditions if it relied on inaccurate data.
"Prices keep increasing but the definition of poverty doesn't," she told The Jakarta Post.
Indonesia's overall inflation for 2010 stood at 6.96 percent, a figure higher than both the state's budget estimate at 5.3 percent and the central bank's estimate of 4 to 6 percent, the BPS reported.
Revrisond said inaccurate statistics would cause "wide deviations" between the government's poverty reduction plans and the actual results achieved.