Robert Go, Jakarta – Iced coconut juice seller Budiman, 43, set down his 30-kg gear wearily and fanned himself with a folded tabloid newspaper that occasionally also serves as his sun-shield.
"I only care about getting home with enough money to eat and to buy coconuts for tomorrow," he said as he stood cloaked by exhaust fumes and dust at one of Jakarta's busiest intersections. He makes 20,000 rupiah on a good day, just enough to keep him going for the next day.
The poor have borne the brunt of Indonesia's continuing economic slump. Those who have been poor for a long time are getting poorer.
"We need a whole new paradigm for dealing with this problem," said chairman H.S. Dillon of the newly-formed BKPK poverty task force. "We need to generate meaningful employment and streams of revenue that will enable poor households to improve themselves." Recent data from national statistics agency BPS, as well as several poverty-focused NGOs, project further gloom.
The average Indonesian now spends 65 per cent of his daily income on food alone, up from 55 per cent in 1996. Total daily expenditure for over 90 per cent of the population is less than 10,000 rupiah per person.
BPS claims unemployment stands at between 6.5 and 7 per cent. But analysts have put the number of jobless and underemployed at 40 per cent of the working-age population of roughly 90 million.
"The longer that this lasts, the more difficult it will be to tackle the long-term effects of poverty on the next generation," said Mr Raden Pardede of the Danareksa Research Institute.
Government inefficiency and corruption are part of the problem. The World Bank and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, two major supporters of poverty-alleviation programmes in Indonesia, separately withdrew a combined US$600 million in social-safety-net loans in March and April.
Government officials, including Coordinating Economic Minister Rizal Ramli, have admitted that misappropriation of funds and poor implementation of programmes contributed to the lenders' decision.
Economist Sri Adiningsih of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta said: "The government has too many preoccupations, like politics, to deal effectively with poverty and other economic issues." The real impact of poverty, according to her and other analysts, is that people are getting used to lower standards of living.
"Secondary needs such as education, health care and nutrition suffer. Their first concern is to avoid hunger. It does not matter how they do it, or with what," she said.
In the meantime, Mr Budiman and his friends spend their time at that intersection watching BMWs, Opels and Mercedes-Benzes crawl through the congested traffic. "It's the same story for everyone here. Why complain?" he asked.