Poverty Eradication

The government is very serious to eliminate poverty of Indonesia's people. I have been working for that program led by Vice President Secretariat and I conclude the program will not be very effective. The program did not address the real problem of poverty: low income!

People create incomes from working in the factories, selling goods and services such as merchants or doctors, entertaining people in TV show, etc. And the beginning of those things is the work of entrepreneur, private sectors. These entities are the true incomes creators. Low incomes appear from low added value products. And people with low incomes or no fixed incomes are poor people. That is poverty.

What is the government has to do?

Most of our people work as farmers. Do the farmers have more incomes than the worker in the factories? I guess they don't. Indonesia's farmer's productivity is low due to too much farmers for less irrigated farming. So the government should have focused on building more factories. Do we have resources to do this? I guess we don't. We have less spirited people of entrepreneurship. So the government should invite Foreign Direct Investment and develop more special economic zones. This strategy is very effective and very fast to make country prosper. We have many paragons such as China.

Until now I have seen no keen policy to enhance our industry sectors. And the industry contribution to Gross Domestic Product is declining. Indonesia lags behind the next rising star country, Vietnam, in terms of Foreign Direct Investment. The government seems pay no attention to promote special economic zones.
This is the upstream of the poverty problem that the government should have addressed since 30 years ago. And now president SBY's pro poor program is to do face-lift in the downstream.

Mr. President, Special Economic Zones will answer the poverty problem effectively.