Who are the country’s poor rural people?
Increasingly, poverty is concentrated among rural households. The poorest people in rural areas tend to be farm labourers working on other people’s land, and smallholders farming on extremely small plots of less than 0.5 ha. There is a large proportion of women in the labour force, but they earn less than men. Poor women are often physically overworked because they have to attend to household work in addition to agricultural tasks. Often they are excluded from decisions that affect them. Where are Indonesia’s rural poor people? The poorest areas of Indonesia are the remote eastern islands, where 95 per cent of people in rural communities are poor. Unsustainable livelihood systems and isolation make people vulnerable to external shocks and are the principal causes of poverty, mainly in the upland areas. In many provinces in Eastern Indonesia farmers make their living by harvesting a single crop on dry land. They live in a subsistence economy and are not able to achieve food self-suffici
