COVID-19: Beyond a Public Health Crisis

 

by: Albert Au & Raditya Darningtyas

The flaws and injustices embedded in the Indonesian socio-economic systems have been exposed by COVID-19. From the way our BPJS National Health Program fails to provide essential services during these critical times to the inconsistencies between our central and regional governments are on policies surrounding Mudik. By treating the pandemic solely as a “health crisis”, we risk over-emphasizing healthcare over other growing problems in other sectors. In reality, the pandemic we are in isn’t an exclusively health-related phenomenon, its impact is widespread.

The healthcare, labor, economy, agriculture, and the environment sectors overlap more than they seem. If anything, the ongoing pandemic has exposed their close relationship with one another.

Our government, once an advocate of a “health-centric” approach to the crisis, has switched gears to an economic one with the introduction of the “new normal” protocols. Further illustrating how the economic sector isn’t immune to the events in the health sector, you can’t have one or the other.

When mass quarantine measures are put into place to “flatten the curve”, many provinces face difficulties in transporting food supplies because of the lack of logistics personnel and roadblocks. This leaves some provinces in abundance while others with food shortages. The former typically constitute regions whose cultivable land has been used for mining or palm oil operations and are thus dependent on other regions for food supplies.

As food becomes increasingly scarce in such regions, prices for key commodities like garlic, sugar, and chicken increase, decreasing the people's purchasing power and disrupting the local economy. The Government then steps in by enacting “emergency” policies, such as cetak sawah, that aim to greater environmental degradation by clearing out more land to produce more food. All while the surplus of food in food-producing regions decreases the prices of staple crops; owing to the lack of means to transport them, further putting farmers at risk of being unable to invest in their next harvest.

The struggles and problems faced by healthcare workers, farmers, blue-collar workers, indigenous rights, and climate change activists, are thus all intertwined with one another. Activists in all layers and sectors of society all fight towards one goal - that is to create and imagine an alternative system that would safeguard the rights and wellbeing of the vulnerable.

But only after COVID-19 exposed the importance of food security, universal healthcare, and workers’ rights did the government start paying attention. Even then, instead of addressing grassroots demands for justice and equality, our Government further exacerbates these grievances by formulating half-thought out “emergency” policies.

For years, farmers and indigenous communities all over Indonesia have fought against the Government and business owners that intend to seize their cultivable land for commercial interests. Farmers near Mount Kendeng, Central Java fought against the construction of a cement factory that threatened the people’s source of water; while villagers in Kulonprogo, Yogyakarta, have fought against the construction of the new Yogyakarta International Airport that evicts farmers from their own fields. Like many other rural communities around Indonesia, these farmers’ wellbeing, income, and indigenous identities are dependent on their natural environment around them.

Appropriating farmers’ fields for commercial interests would not only result in the erosion of the farmers’ rights, income, and overall well being, but it also translates to making their regions more vulnerable to natural disasters and famine.

In their ongoing struggle, Kendeng farmers who protested by cementing their own feet at the presidential palace in Jakarta, and Kulonprogo villagers in Yogyakarta who used their own bodies as obstructions for bulldozers from destroying their crops, knew that there was more at stake than just losing their land. Yet despite these consequences, our government continues to push opt for policies that would yield the most economic growth at the expense of the environment and its own people.

However, now, as key commodities grow increasingly scarce across 20 regions during an upcoming drought season, our government scrambles to secure food supplies by enacting cetak sawah; that includes clearing an additional 900,000 hectares of peat lands, wetlands and dry land in Central Kalimantan. A move that would have not been necessary had the government allowed our farmers to keep and cultivate their lands.

Afraid that a stagnant economy would eventually lead to the scarcity or inflation of food, our President recently introduced the “New Normal” protocol (tatatan kehidupan baru). The protocol urges citizens to “live alongside the virus” in the hopes that herd immunity would eventually flatten the curve while the government opts for a strategy that places already marginalized peoples at greater risk of health/employment-related issues.

The Government, under heavy pressure to keep the country’s economy moving, sees a greater need to push for the Omnibus bill, a controversial 1028 page draft of loosely defined regulations that aims to improve the ease of doing business and attract investment in Indonesia. The bill is highly contested by labor unions and environmentalists alike for allowing labor-intensive industries to not adhere to regional minimum wages (upah minimum propinsi) when paying their workers relaxing environmental standards for businesses respectively. If the bill’s current draft isn’t revised and passed, it would among others, infringe upon press freedoms, promote environmental degradation and further curb the already little rights and benefits blue collar workers enjoy.

Like our farmers, our blue-collar workers are among many other Indonesians who have been relentlessly fighting to promote or rather secure their already minimal rights and income. Most of us cite the hardships they endure simply as occupational hazards rather than grand systemic injustices that merit our attention and resources. However, the pandemic has revealed that they are truly essential in sustaining our society. And yet we merely endow titles like “essential workers” or “heroes” to our household helpers, store cashiers and truck or motorbike taxi drivers, instead of helping them overcome the injustices they face.

It is critical to understand that we are more connected by the problems we face than we think. Especially when we live under a government that wouldn’t think twice in choosing an economic/development plan that would eventually be at the expense of the environment and consequently its people.

COVID-19 has shown and proven to us that the ideals that we strived to achieve as a nation prior to the pandemic are the exact ones we need to put behind us. Especially ideals that encourage/allow us to be idle amidst the suffering of others. Oppressors heavily rely on the “apathetic” or “non-political” nature of its people, and thereby adopting such attitudes amplifies the injustices faced by those with lesser privileges.

It is time that we start acknowledging the struggles and grievances of our people at the grassroots level and since history has shown us that pandemics can be used as great momentums to incite change; let’s begin tilting the scales of justice away from oppression and towards social equality.