Nurfika Osman – With the United Nations warning of rapid world population growth, experts are calling on the government to increase people's awareness of and access to family planning services.
"The government should be able to guarantee that every family has access to birth control and that people from every region get the same service at facilities," said Sonny Harmadi, director of the University of Indonesia's Demographic Institute.
Sonny said many of the problems faced by the country were actually the result of a population growing too rapidly. He added that this fact was not properly understood by many of the country's leaders.
"The problems of transportation, traffic jams, fuel subsidies, food insecurity and so on, they emerge because of the population being too large.," Sonny said. "We can never meet these needs if we cannot control the population."
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said on Wednesday that the world's population would reach seven billion by the end of October. Indonesia ranked fifth in population growth rate after India, China, Nigeria and Pakistan, with four million babies born every year and approximately 700,000 deaths a year.
Sonny says that urgent steps need to be taken to revitalize family planning programs because they are central to controlling the population.
Family planning programs were widely enforced during the three decades under the rule of former President Suharto, but they quickly fell out of favor after the autocrat stepped down in 1998.
Sonny said that to successfully reboot the country's family planning program, the participation of local government leaders was important. However, he continued, more often than not, those leaders did not share the view that family planning services were necessary.
"They still think family planning is only about birth control, while it is much more than that because almost every issue starts from population," he said.
Martha Santoso Ismail, the UNFPA assistant representative in Indonesia, said that cultural issues presented the biggest challenge to family planning programs.
"There are people who refuse the idea of birth control because they still think the more children you have, the more fortune you stand to get. Or they simply refuse it because they think children are gifts from God and we have to accept them," she said.
The segment of the Indonesian population older than 60 years old accounted for 21.4 million people in 2010 and is expected to reach 73.5 million in 2050, meaning the country could face a double population burden.
"Without proper income and health insurance, families will not have enough resources to fulfill their basic needs," Ismail said. "Everything will be more expensive for them."
Sugiri Syarif, the head of the National Family Planning Coordinating Agency (BKKBN), said it had allotted Rp 2.4 trillion ($281 million) for family planning programs across the country this year.
However, he warned that the budget was far from enough and thus local leaders would have to pitch in.