Understanding Poverty and the Poor Itself

IT'S an interesting report that on 2005 United Nations make a review on “The Contribution of Tourism to Poverty Alleviation” published by ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and The Pacific) number 25. They mentions some best practice from countries like Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Lao, Malaysia, Maldives, Nepal, Philippines, Srilanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam. The countries above have any experiences for tourism development and poverty alleviation. On Indonesia since 1990s tourism has shown significant growth as indicated by increased number of both domestic and international tourists. Tourism has had an impact on goods and services, employment, wages, and salaries, the total national wages and GDP. However due to the impact of 9, 11th 2001 and the Bali tragedy (12th October 2002)the number of international arrivals dropped to 5,033 million and the average length of stay began to decrease. As a result, foreign exchange earnings dropped to only $US 4.5 billion. Several initiative for poverty alleviation through tourism development are possible under government of Indonesia initiatives.
From the UN-ESCAP Report, a charming view is on “understanding poverty”, it is an eye catching for people who study economic-development. Here I put some chapter:
(a) Understanding poverty
Since the 1950s, there have been attempts to understand poverty at different levels. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) defined poverty as the deprivation of essential assets and opportunities to which every human is entitled. The ADB argued that everyone should have access to basic education and primary health services. Poor households have the right to sustain themselves by their labour, be reasonably rewarded and have some protection from external shocks. Beyond income and basic services, individuals and societies are poor and tend to remain so, if they are not empowered to participate in making the decisions that shape their lives.
The World Bank described poverty in a similar holistic manner while specifying its various dimensions: levels of income and consumption, social factors, vulnerability to risks and access to sound socio-political conditions. However, poverty has been most commonly understood in terms of income levels and has usually been measured against a poverty line, such as the one set by the World Bank at US$ 1 per day. There is a general consensus among people and organizations in the development community that to effectively carry out the mission against poverty it should be understood in all of its forms and dimensions.
ESCAP has focused on the various dimensions of poverty and has stated:
Poverty essentially has three closely interrelated aspects: poverty of money, poverty of access and poverty of power. These make the working, living and social environments of the poor extremely insecure and severely limit the options available to them to improve their lives. Without choices and security, breaking the cycle of poverty becomes virtually impossible and leads to the marginalization and alienation of the poor from society


(b) Dimensions and causes of poverty
According to the World Bank, the broad causes of poverty cover three general dimensions. First, there is the lack of income and assets to obtain basic necessities (such as, food, shelter, clothing and acceptable levels of health and education). Assets can be described as good health, the skills necessary for achieving employment, access to basic infrastructure, money in savings or access to credit. In addition, there are social assets, such as a network of contacts and reciprocal obligations which can be called on in a time of need. Social assets can be essential in moving from poverty to a state of well-being.
Second, poverty involves a sense of being powerless and unheard in various social institutions. This includes unfair sociological conditions where the poor are faced with inhumane treatment, lack of protection against violence, intimidation and lack of civility and unpredictability in their interactions with public officials.
Third, poverty includes a vulnerability to adverse shocks linked to an inability to cope with them. The poor are susceptible to various risks of health, natural or human-made hazards and often are incapable of economically, socially, physically and emotionally recovering from these shocks.
While these are the broad and immediate causes of poverty, there are also global causes of poverty, encompassing issues such as national and regional economic growth, the impact of globalization, inequality of income distribution and instability in governance. At the local level, poverty is manifested in the form of poor health and lack of access to good medical facilities, illiteracy, irregular income, informal employment, lack of land tenure for housing, lack of basic infrastructure, and so forth. At the national level, it is usually measured in relation to the GDP of the country.
(c) Understanding the difference between urban and rural poverty
The usual estimate of a poverty line set at US$ 1 per person per day is often too low when considering that the urban poor have other non food-related costs, such as transportation, education, housing, water, sanitation, health care and medicines. The complexities of urban systems, the higher cost of living in urban areas and a variety of factors such as tenure insecurity, unfavourable urban governance and policies, means that urban poverty measures and strategies for poverty reduction have to be different from those in rural areas.
In rural areas, most livelihoods depend on access to land and/or water for raising crops and livestock or access to forests and fisheries. In urban areas, poor people depend more on income to satisfy their basic needs. Poor people in rural areas have access to various assets to satisfy their basic needs such as production of food and exchange of goods for other necessary goods.
(d) Role of tourism in poverty reduction
As a tool for poverty reduction, the challenge for tourism is how and where to intervene in order to provide better opportunities, empowerment and security to poor people at the local level, in addition to stimulating economic growth at national and regional levels. Pro-poor tourism can be introduced simultaneously in rural and urban areas and thus open various opportunities and increase access not only for tourists but for local residents. Tourism can increase opportunities for the rural poor in their own communities. It has the potential to help reduce rural out-migration to urban areas, increase employment opportunities for the urban poor due to tourism, and give people additional income to provide for their families in rural areas.
Tourism is thus an appropriate mechanism for poverty reduction. It contributes to economic growth and can also have social, environmental and cultural benefits and costs. Tourism provides employment opportunities by diversifying and increasing income, which reduces the vulnerability of poor people. As a result of increased national income (foreign exchange earnings and taxation), additional funds can be diverted to poverty reduction programmes.
Tourism directly responds to poverty reduction objectives, because the WTO has argued that it:
• Unlocks opportunities for pro-poor economic growth by providing formal and informal employment
• Creates profit and collective income from locally-owned enterprises
• Facilitates social development by increasing access to infrastructure, providing local people with the opportunity to access tourism infrastructure.
• Helps increase participation of the local communities in decision-making as tourism products are often assets owned by the poor
• Reduces vulnerability by helping to diversify income opportunities
• Promotes environmental protection as the natural and human environment are the life lines of tourism development.

Masih menyelesaikan tesis di Magister Perencanaan, Fakultas Ekonomi, Universitas Indonesia. Doakan saya. Jakarta 31 Oktober 2007

October 28th: The Youth Pledge Day

HOW TO MAINTAIN THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH PLEDGE DAY? On 28th October 2007 we coinciding with the 79th Youth Pledge Day. Relevant to that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on the people, especially the youth, to develop the culture of maintaining health and the habit of doing physical exercises in order to be able to win the global competition. The president in the company of First Lady Ani Yudhoyono made the call at a function launching the Movement of Indonesian Healthy Youth here Sunday 28th.

"The youth and teenagers should keep doing physical exercises, maintaining health, being creative, maintaining harmony among them, avoiding narcotics and violent acts as well as averting free intercourse to safe the future, make them leading young generation and develop the nation, the president said on The Jakarta Post.

The president said the government would continue to carry out programs to make the Indonesian people remain healthy by providing funds needed for the purpose.

On the commemoration of the Youth Pledge Day, the head of state called on the younger generation to maintain the spirit of the Youth Pledge in order that they and the Indonesian people in general would be leading in the globalization era towards the prosperous future.

Meanwhile, Youth and Sports Minister Adhyaksa Dault said the launching of the movement was a strategic momentum to improve the condition of the Indonesian young people.

He said the effort to invite young people to have the pattern of living healthily still faced some problems including the fact that many plots of land which should be made as public facilities and sports activities were converted into shopping centres among other things.
For the youth Oath of 1928, we are grateful for the consciousness of those young students in Batavia who put all their sectarian interests behind them for a bigger dream, the dream of Indonesia. Bramantyo Prijosusilo, from Ngawi, East Java wrote on the JP, that from that date Indonesians began to exist and posses a dream of a new culture, a culture that encompasses everything good from all the cultures among the many ethnic groups that live in the archipelago, but also recognizes the modern world as an equal, and Bahasa Indonesia began to earnestly develop Indonesia's nationalism.
Anthropologist Ben Anderson once wrote of being puzzled by the fact that so many Javanese writers write in Indonesian even though they speak Javanese in intimate situations, and a current analysis of spoken Javanese would show that the indigenous language now borrows heavily from not only the archipelago's lingua franca but also from English and IT-speak.
Much of what was Javanese is now being forgotten by the general population and has become a specialist field that interests academics. If there is a perceived danger of globalization wiping out local cultures, the spread and usage of Bahasa Indonesia here has proved to affect local languages in much the same way.
Our founding fathers often emphasized that our nationalism is part of internationalism and is based on humanity. From the beginning nationalism here set out not to be the foremost among nations. We wished only to exist among other nations as brothers and sisters and not as slaves, coolies or poor cousins.
The youths of 1928 knew of the dangers that nationalism could breed. They must have been relieved when in hindsight they reflected on their actions of 1928 and found that the seeds they planted had grown without running wild like nationalism under Hitler.
Every so often, the danger of over-boiling nationalism used as a political wild card to create social conflict looms up and shows its ugly face in the form of racial or ethnic conflict in this country. Fortunately, a Javanese would say, we have been lucky: All the times Indonesia's society seemed to be ripping apart at the seams, we pulled through.
Reflecting on our often violent history it is amazing that we are still here at all. We have had many political killings, more than enough religious conflict, racial violence, cruel military operations against residents and several economic near-collapses, but we are still here today, with one country, one nation and one language, and nationalism here still has a good name.
We are fortunate to have many activists who consciously strive to produce Indonesian literature, Indonesian music, Indonesian art, just as we have people who are studying and developing our traditional arts. As globalization is diluting our identity and merging it into one worldwide image we have our Indonesian-ness and our ethnicities to give us an essential system of values that allows us to not only imagine ourselves as unique, but also essentially full of virtue.
When we feel confident, we are a big-hearted nation capable of offering real support to others less fortunate than us. When we are bewildered by the changes enveloping every aspect of our lives, we feel small and act petty. The way we went over the top when we ranted against Malaysia for the brutality of a couple of policeman against an Indonesian sports official there recently shows how things easily get out of proportion when nationalism as an emotion is given fuel.
Surely we know that there are brutal elements in every police force in the world, and that the actions of some individuals is not the responsibility of the state or the government. But when Malaysia is involved we get all emotional and blur the boundaries in our minds. Perhaps recently we have been feeling small.
As a concept of identity that encompasses local disciplines and knowledge, nationalism has served us well. As an emotion nationalism often misleads to disastrous consequences. It is one thing for nationalism to, for instance, spur on a scientist to solve the problems of Jakarta's pollution, floods and congestion, but another story completely when nationalism calls for blood to pay for a perceived insult or injury against us.
In the first case nationalism becomes a positive force that calls an individual's dedication to some noble cause, but in the latter, nationalism is no more than a negative feeling, akin to jealousy, fear or hatred, and can only breed suffering.
When we talk about one country, one nation and one language, we should be saying that with the Indonesian dream in mind. At all costs we should avoid the Indonesian nightmare. If we dream of Indonesia as a country that is just and prosperous, the Indonesian nightmare is a fascist country where everything is centralized and there is only one voice ever heard, be it the voice of a strong military man, neo-conservative global powers or the voice of literalist religion, or an unholy alliance of the three.
We want an Indonesia that is united by its lively diversity and not by fear or force.