With population approaching U.S., Indonesia revives birth control

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono wants families to stop at two children to prevent a burgeoning population overwhelming schools and services. Asih, a cleaner in Tangerang, near Jakarta, is stopping at seven.

"In my family, we always had a lot of children, and as long as we still had something to eat, why do family planning?" said Asih, 35. "Now I have two children in primary school and more that will have to go in the next few years and I have no money to pay school fees. Seven kids are enough."

Facing slower investment and one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the Asia-Pacific region, the government is concerned the demographic dividend that attracts companies seeking a young, cheap workforce will become an economic time bomb. As Indonesia's growth slows, the world's fourth-most- populous nation isn't generating enough quality jobs to keep up with the population, the International Labour Organization said.

That prospect has brought the revival of a birth-control program begun 46 years ago by former President Suharto, who managed to halve the fertility rate to about 2.6, where it's been stuck ever since. The government wants to cut the rate to the replacement level of 2.1 within two years to prevent the 250 million population doubling by 2060.

"We have to go back to the policies of the Suharto era, to make strong campaigns and bring the fertility rate down," said M Sairi Hasbullah, head of Indonesia's statistics bureau for East Java province. "It's not going to be easy to provide food, education, health facilities and infrastructure for 500 million people. It's a big danger for Indonesia."

The government increased the budget for family planning programs almost fourfold since 2006, to 2.6 trillion rupiah ($214 million) in 2013, funding everything from training rural midwives via text messages, to persuading Muslim clerics to encourage vasectomies. The measures extend efforts dating back to 1968, when Suharto set up the National Family Planning Institute to provide advice and contraceptives.

While Southeast Asia's largest economy is trying to slow population growth, other countries in the region are trying to increase it. Singapore offers cash handouts and extended maternity leave to encourage its citizens to have more kids, while China has loosened its 34-year-old one-child policy that has saddled the nation with an aging labor force.

"Indonesia is seen by other countries as an opportunity because of its population," said Aris Ananta, who has published books on Indonesian demographics and is currently a senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. "It's an asset. The government is shifting its responsibilities if it's blaming population growth" for a failure to provide enough infrastructure or jobs, he said.

About 19.6 percent of Indonesian youths between the ages of 15 and 24 were jobless in 2012, compared with about 16 percent in the Philippines, according to the ILO. Unemployment, inflation and the so-called youth bulge, a phenomenon where a large share of the population is comprised of children and young adults, contributed to the Arab Spring protests that ousted leaders in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in 2011.

Indonesia's labor force will grow 11.2 percent this decade through 2020, while its population will increase about 11.5 percent, according to Bank of America Corp. The high proportion of young adults — about 50 percent of Indonesians are aged below 30 — has attracted companies such as L'Oreal SA, the world's largest cosmetics maker, which opened its biggest factory globally in West Java in 2012 to supply products to Southeast Asia.

source: azstarnet.com