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Introduction
For the past 18 months, Indonesia has been reported by the world's media as suffering from horrible food shortages as a result of El Nino and La Nina. It had therefore been provided with very heavy food aid - amounts high enough to begin to affect the global market of the commodities provided. It was, however, the observation of increasingly many regional organizations that the situation was nowhere near as bad as was being made out. It was decided by the Southeast Asian Food Security and Fair Trade Council to initiate a fact finding mission to Indonesia to investigate the seriousness of the shortage at a grassroots level (from farmers and communities) as opposed to the government's often poorly reliable and self-serving aggregate data.
As Li Kheng Poh, Executive Secretary of the Council that organized this mission, has suggested; Food Aid can be a very dirty political game and often the ultimate recipients of food aid (the poor) are indirectly left with the bill. Food aid, furthermore, is often greatly supported by donor nations as it provides an easy market for their excess agricultural produce. Contrary to popular understanding, food aid is NOT free. It may be provided free to some degree but the vast majority is provided at special prices or special interest loans are negotiated for its purchase. In the end, the bill has to be footed by the recipient nation's taxpayers while donor nations have essentially a cheap 'make work' program for its farmers and food handling industries. For these reasons, it is always necessary to be quite critical of the validity of food aid schemes.
This report provided in this e-portfolio is a summary of 10 days of observations and discussions from my tour on the Indonesian Fact Finding Mission. Myself, along with the ex-Director of FAO (Asia Pacific) Dr. A.Z.M. Obaidullah Khan were posted in East Timor, a once Portugese colony that was violently annexed by the Indonesian military dictatorship in 1975.
All that is expressed in the notes and paraphrasings contained in this East Timor e-Portfolio are my own and so, then, are the errors, omissions, and other indescretions that may be present. Nothing in these pages have been reviewed by any member of the Fact Finding Mission Team and it should not necessarily be understood that there is any endorsement of these pages by the Mission Team, the Council or any of its funders.
A full official report on the whole of the Indonesian Food Aid investigation, produced by the Southeast Asian Food Security and Fair Trade Council, is now available . If anyone wishes to obtain a copy of this report they should be able to find it at the website of Focus on the Global South (http://www.focusweb.org/). If you want to find out more about the Southeast Asian Council for Food Security and Fair Trade Council, you can contact the Executive Secretary at apscare@po.jaring.myor contact the Chair of the Council at w.bello@focusweb.org. An Executive Summary from the full report is available on this site.
For those people who are interested in learning more about the situation
in Timor, here are a couple of links:
East Timor Action Network. Their
website can be found at http://www.etan.org.
East Timor Relief Association (ETRA).
Their website can be found at http://www.pactok.net.au/docs/et/.
JD Comtois
March, 1999
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~FIN~