An unfinished revolution.

• Author: Runyan, Curtis
• Position: Indonesian economy

The mountainous landscape of the central Indonesian islands is heavily used. Little brick homes with corrugated tin roofs, sprawling schools with heavily used soccer fields, and white-washed mosques with chrome spires dot the countryside. Stair-step rice paddies have been sculpted into the sides of gentle hills and massive volcanoes. Java, an island about the same size of Cuba, is packed with a population of 120 million - about half the population of the United States. Aside from a series of national parks and active volcanoes, uninhabited land is rare.

But looking down from the grassy foothills of the northwest face of Gunung Rinjani, the 3,700-meter-tall ringed volcano looming over the island of Lombok, you can see a mysteriously pristine patch of forest that turns into an empty rolling field down near the ocean. In the low voice of a life-long clove cigarette smoker, my guide, Suhardi, pointed to the land and said that President Soeharto, who stepped down amidst economic collapse and mass protests in May 1998, had granted control of the area to one of his billionaire businessman sons. "Before the economic troubles started, this land was to become a resort hotel," he said. But instead, after last year's terrible drought and the country's economic collapse, which has caused the tripling of food prices, a nearby village has released its cattle to graze there, and people have even begun planting rice.

It's no secret that the pressures caused by Indonesia's breakdown will take their heaviest toll on the country's poorest people. An annual survey by the government's Bureau of Statistics found that the number of people working in agriculture in early 1998 had increased by 15 percent to 42 million, while the number in industry, transportation, and finances had dropped by 10 percent to 16 million. "Many people are returning to the countryside from the cities," lamented Suhardi. "This year I have no land to work." And he is not alone. In Indonesia, extended families in rural communities act as a social safety net for those who have lost their jobs in the cities. But with two consecutive seasons of poor harvests, there is a limit to how much the countryside can take.

"No country in recent history, let alone one the size of Indonesia, has ever suffered such a dramatic reversal of fortune," reported the World Bank's annual economic survey of the country last July. According to estimates, 100 million Indonesians - half of the country's population - are now living in poverty, up from an admittedly low government estimate of 30 million in 1997. More than 15,000 workers in Jakarta alone now lose their jobs every day. Many can afford to eat only one meal of little more than rice each day.

Across the country, bands of poor farmers and unemployed workers have resorted to extreme measures to make ends meet. Outside Jakarta, farmers infiltrated a luxury golf course, planted cassava and bananas on the greens, and carved into the fairway in large letters the word that has become Indonesia's battle cry for political reform and equity: "Reformasi." Sulawesi and Sumatra have seen a Significant resurgence of hunting of any and all wild animals - endangered and endemic species like macaque monkeys, Sumatran tigers, and flying foxes can be found for sale as exotic cuisine for foreigners or as expensive Chinese medicines. In Jakarta, a city of 8 million, the government has cut its $1.7 million environment budget outright, halting programs that monitor air and water pollution...