Hera Diani, Jakarta – Malnutrition in the country is caused by more complex factors than just poverty, experts say.

Latifahsa, a volunteer at a Bogor community health service post, said one of her clients, Atikah, 25, a resident of Sukaraja district in the city, has a six-year-old child and 19-month toddler who have suffered from malnutrition.

The family's income from farm laborer husband Endar at Rp 10,000 (around US$1) a day puts the family among the poorest of the poor 70 million people in the country.

However, "Endar spends over a third of his wages on cigarettes instead of buying food for his sons. Atikah doesn't dare to scold him. She even said Endar deserved the cigarettes for working so hard," Latifahsa said. She accompanied Atikah to a seminar on malnutrition on Thursday.

Anthropologist Achmad Fedyani Saifuddin from the University of Indonesia said on the Dieng plateau in Central Java, many people suffered from an iodine deficiency. The problem affected mostly women and children because the local tradition required men as the primary income earners to eat food first, with the remainder going to women and children.

Research Achmad's team in Yahukimo, Papua, showed that malnutrition there was in part caused by the decreasing amount of agricultural land because of deforestation.

In Sambas, West Kalimantan, Achmad said around 50 percent of infants suffered from malnutrition because of their dietary habits. Most new mothers only ate rice and dried fish at meals and left out vegetables because they were perceived as the "food of the poor".

Health Ministry 2004 data shows that 28.47 percent of children under five, or around five million children, are suffering from malnutrition, with 1.5 million severely malnourished. These numbers are believed to have increased in 2005.

While it is most visible in children, malnutrition also affects women, the data says. Five out of 10 pregnant women suffer from a lack of nutrition, which increases the infant mortality rate and the number of babies born with low birth weights, they say.

Ministry nutrition development section head Tatang S. Falah said the government could only reduce national malnutrition rates by less than 10 percent between 1989 and 2004.

"That is because the (government's) efforts have never been comprehensive. We actually have the framework; we have the Food Resilience Board. But good implementation is lacking," Tatang said.