Marianne Kearney, Jakarta – Meeting 60-year-old Daruna as she chews betel nut in front of the piles of rubbish that are her main source of income, it is hard to see any evidence of Indonesia's economic upturn.

In slums such as Kelapa Gading, where the lower rung of the poor eke out an existence literally on top of the rubbish dump, most people cannot afford three meals a day, and have little chance of being able to soon.

"If I could not buy this rice then I would not be able to buy it from the market," she says, referring to rice she buys through an aid scheme. Before the aid programme began last December, Daruna, whose husband "flew off and left her", depended on the sale of home-grown vegetables to raise a small amount of extra cash.

She and her neighbours pick through the piles of rubbish, salvaging and selling what they could for a living.

Through the World Food Programme, she can buy rice at 1,000 rupiah (23 Singapore cents) a kg, half the cost of that sold in the markets.

As rice is one of the major foods for rich and poor alike a 100 per cent discount in the cost of rice means people like Daruna can now afford to buy some other foods such as the occasional egg.

While the figures show that poverty levels are improving, aid groups such as World Food Programme, which distributes rice to 5.2 million people in Jakarta, Surabaya and Semarang, say there is little sign of improvement for those at the very bottom of the poverty line.

They say their meagre incomes have not kept pace with rises in the cost of foods such as eggs, which has doubled since the start of the crisis.

Thus one study from the United Nations estimates that 56 million people would be struggling to afford three cheap meals a day. "When you are dealing with the bottom group they are not reached by any improvement in the economy. They are even worse off than a year ago because they have sold everything they have," says Mr Philip Clarke, from the World Food Programme.

He explains that in the first stages of the crisis many families survived by selling lounges and other pieces of furniture, or borrowing from their family, but now they have exhausted all these sources of extra revenue.

Rahayisit, a 30-year-old living in Kelapa Gading says although her husband works as a road sweeper, their family of five cannot eat properly on his monthly wage of 150,000 a month. Clutching her nine-month old baby, she says she often has to buy food on credit from her local warung, or food stall, and depends on buying discounted rice through an aid programme.

Studies by the United Nations Development Programme also say that the very poor became even poorer as a result of the crisis two years ago. They say that the number of people living 80 per cent below the poverty line increased from 8 million to 22 million.

And the number of people spending almost all their income on food, an indicator that there is little money for other necessities, has jumped dramatically.

The poor health of young children is another disturbing barometer. Unicef estimates that 40 per cent of children under two years old age are malnourished, and in rural Java, some children have begun developing diseases usually seen in famine- ridden Africa.

Aid workers and the United Nations reports say that while emergency programmes such as the sale of subsidised rice and scholarship schemes helped soften the impact of rising costs, the government still has not considered how to help the long-term poor, particularly the very poor.

"The government still has no food security programme, food production policy and no pricing system to convince the market to sell to the government," says Mr Clarke, who predicts that the very poor will need assistance for at least another year.

The crisis has accentuated not only the rich/poor divide but also the rural/urban divide, creating almost three times as many extremely poor people in rural areas.

Part of the reason why there are so many poor people in rural areas is that even before the crisis there were far more poor people in the country, with many people teetering just above the edge of poverty. Droughts in 1997 and 1998 pushed many poor farmers over the precipice.

Ironically too, the current bumper harvest of rice as well as imported grains on the market have hurt rice farmers, who are receiving very low rates for their crop.