Hungry season in Timor-Leste: after the Portuguese and the Indonesians has come an invasion of aid donors and free-market blueprints. Ben Moxham wonders why people in newly liberated Timor-Leste , who have endured so much, should now be starving

New Internationalist, May, 2005 by Ben Moxham

On 7 February 2005 the Timor-Leste newspaper Suara Timor Loro Sa'e reported that since October 2004 at least 53 people had died of starvation in the village of Hatabuilico. 'There is absolutely nothing to eat,' Domingos de Araujo, the sub-district secretary was reported as saying, and 'those still alive are looking for wild potatoes in the forest'.

The Government denied the report, with the suggestion that they had died of disease over a longer period of time, albeit exacerbated by malnutrition and lack of access to medical care. Angered at the airing of the issue, Prime Minister Alkatiri withdrew all government advertising from the newspaper and served it with an eviction order.

But reports continue to filter in. A huge crop failure in the coastal district of Cova Lima threatens 10,000 people with starvation. Los Palos, Baucau and Manufahi districts have all reported food shortages. Approximately 40 per cent of children under five years old are suffering from malnutrition in Liquica, according to CARE.

The Government's National Disaster Management Office says this is not 'starvation and hunger like in Somalia. Ethiopia, Sudan and elsewhere'. What is happening, it says, 'is known as FOOD SHORTAGE' (their capitalization). This 'happens every year'.

And there lies the deeper tragedy: this is not extraordinary news. Hunger is so common in Timor-Leste that November to March is referred to as the 'hungry season'. Last year, the World Food Programme distributed food aid to 110,000 people in 11 out of the country's 13 districts; in a 2001 survey 80 per cent of villages reported being without adequate food at some time during the year.

While Timor's harsh climate is partly responsible, the question that screams to be asked is why a nation of just under a million people, which in the last five years is supposed to have received more donor funds per capita than anywhere else in the world, is going hungry.

Since the independence referendum of 1999 an estimated $3 billion in reconstruction money has been swirling around corporate board rooms, Dili's expensive foreign restaurants and the US-dollar bank accounts of international consultants, rarely making the desperately needed trip beyond the city limits of the national capital. In one government department, a single international consultant earns in a month the same as all his 20 Timorese colleagues in an entire year. Another consultant charged the UN $8,000 for his first-class airfare from his island tax haven.

No doubt the past deserves blame, too. The departing Indonesian military destroyed 70 per cent of the infrastructure and displaced two-thirds of the population during their bloody exit in 1999. Their bloody entry had been worse. During a Truth, Reception and Reconciliation Commission public hearing on the famines of the late 1970s, tears rolled as survivors spoke of stepping over the emaciated corpses of family members. Tens of thousands starved to death as the occupiers turned the country into a giant prison camp.

Since the Portuguese first landed on the tiny island nearly 440 years ago, the Timorese struggle to overcome hunger and to control their systems of food production has been intimately tied up with their struggle against foreign occupiers.

For the farmers of Hatabuilico and some 40,000 families across the mountain provinces, coffee is the symbol of this struggle. The Portuguese expanded the industry in the 1800s with the usual colonial formula of land dispossession and forced labour. When the Indonesian military took over in 1976 coffee farmers were effectively required to fund their own genocide.

Since the independence vote in 1999 the donor-prescribed dismantling of state supports for the industry, combined with an oversupplied and deregulated global coffee market, have consigned farmers to misery, Coffee, the nation's flagship export, earned a dismal $5 million in 2003 (total exports were only $6 million)--prices were a mere 19 per cent of their value in 1980 and in 2002 hit their lowest-ever value in real terms.

Following the donor blueprint for Timor's reconstruction, the market has been radically liberalized, state support has been curtailed and government cut in half--restricted to 17,000 staff and a miserly national budget of $75 million. There's no need for Big Government, according to the development elite. The State should stick to being a cheerleader for a 'dynamic private sector' riding high on an export-led economy fuelled by foreign direct investment.

Last year I spoke with a group of rice farmers in Bobonaro district about how they were faring in this brave new globalized world. They lamented that imported rice from Thailand and Vietnam--now making up 55 per cent of domestic consumption--undercuts anything they can produce. Farmers must visit their World Bank-designed and privately run Agricultural Support Centre to purchase farm inputs at prices so high that it pushes their costs of production above the selling price of rice.

With rural life a struggle, Timorese have flocked to Dili looking for jobs. In July last year I visited Domingos Frietas, an old friend bringing up a family of five in a squatted house in Dili. His monthly part-time teaching salary of $50 just isn't enough. A dollarized and liberalized economy, combined with the inflationary spending of the aid invasion, have dragged up the cost of living beyond the average Timorese wage. Rice alone is $15 for a sack that lasts the month.