| Sports |
By JAMES PAINTER
El Nino means hunger in West Timor
KUPANG (West Timor): Aureliana Siki
is soon to give birth to her third child. But she seems far more
anxious about her second child than the imminent arrival of
another.
“She just won’t eat, she’s always getting sick and having
diarrhoea,” she says of her 18-month-old daughter, Amelia Jessica.
“I am so worried she is going to die.”
Amelia clings to her mother, listlessly. She weighs just 7kg and
is officially classified as having severe malnutrition.
Aureliana is aware of one of the reasons why her daughter is
severely malnourished.
“The problem is that we had a bad harvest this year,” she says.
“Instead of harvesting the normal four sacks of rice this year, we
only had two. And instead of 20 bunches of maize, we only had 10.
“I am giving my children three meals a day but I have had to
reduce the quantity in the portions.”
Other women in Aureliana’s village of Tes in a remote part of West
Timor confirm that they too have lost about half of their
production this year.
They say some families are only eating twice a day. The reason is
clear – climate unpredictability. Normally the wet and dry seasons
are distinct. It rains from November to March, and then is dry
from April to October. This year the rainy season was short,
causing drought in some areas.
“Last year, the rain arrived in November,” Yosefina Lake, a
39-year-old woman also from Tes, says. “But then it was dry in
December and we lost a lot of our crop.”
The women are anxious and sad. They say many children in the
village are losing weight. They know because every week they go to
the government health post in the village, known as the Posyandu,
to have their children weighed and measured.
Official figures show that of the 60 children under five living in
Tes, 23 were under weight in July, and 13 had severe malnutrition.
West Timor is one of the poorest areas of Indonesia, and the
district of North Central District (TTU) where Tes is situated is
one of the poorest in West Timor.
In TTU alone, more than 1,200 children are severely malnourished,
while in the whole of West Timor there are more than 9,000.
“There are several reasons why there is severe malnutrition here,”
Anton Efi from Yabiku, an NGO working in the area says, “but
unreliable local food production is certainly one of them.”
The villagers talk of God being responsible for the weather. They
are unfamiliar with the vocabulary of El Nino or climate change.
But climate experts say the weather unpredictability in 2006-07
here was due to what is known as a “moderate El Nino year”.
El Nino is a warming of the central and eastern parts of the
Pacific Ocean, which generally occurs every four to seven years
and is considered responsible for disruptive weather patterns
around the globe. It is blamed for the drought this year in nearby
Australia which is the worst in a century.
A report by the aid agency Care International in March warned that
the combination of failed crops and limited water access caused by
El Nino had triggered a “humanitarian crisis” in the area. El Nino
had contributed to a “serious decline in child nutritional
status”.
Some computer models have suggested that an increase in greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere will increase the frequency and intensity
of El Ninos. However, other models predict little or no change in
how El Ninos occur.
Whatever the truth, officials at the Indonesian environment
ministry are clearly worried that in the future the climate could
become more unpredictable and cause more extreme weather events.
A detailed study released in June by the World Bank and the UK’s
Department for International Development concluded that as “an
archipelago, Indonesia is very vulnerable to the impacts of
climate change”. – BBC
 
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