The Population in Indonesia

I was dazzled when the first time I heard about POET from a lecture at my collage. This term stands for Population, Organization, Environment, and Technology. The term is arranged as a crosspiece, with P on the top, O on the right side, E on the bottom, and T on the left side. All these elements are interdependent and could not be separated. When a population grows rapidly like what is happening among the third world countries like Indonesia, it would impact the organization of people. Simply, it is logical if the population is abundant, the arrangement is hard to be nurtured and controlled. In 2001 the Indonesian population was 203.025.313; it keeps on hiking until 2010 reached 237,556,363. Nowadays, government is forced to deliberate more on economic and social aspects of population explosion to make people lives more bearable. Other logical consequences of this phenomenon are social imbalance and income disparity.

Besides, the environment is being hurt for the sake of human benefits. In order to slow down the negative impact of uncontrolled population growth, advanced technology must be generated. The development of safe transgenic product in agricultural sector must be fostered to ensure the food supply for the people like what is being developed in South Sulawesi Indonesia. But this solution also must be evaluated and enforced because it engendered some problems especially for the farmers. The advantages and methods of implementing advanced agricultural technology must be well socialized especially to grassroots farmers so that they won't be confused and they can perform better productivity. Another effect of population explosion is the low employee absorption due to the limited work field and existence of unskilled workers because of uneven education facility distribution in Indonesia.

In the past era, Indonesia was successful in controlling its birth rate because of the smashing impact of KB (Family Planning Program). The KB value "2 sons or daughters is enough, boys or girls should not be a matter to create a happy family" was quite successful to control the birth rate. But in these recent years, since the democracy era started, the government seems to lose their authority to control people, so that the efficacy of KB program has been consistently decreasing. In my opinion, the government needs to take an opportunity to refresh this KB program, because this program is one of a very effective means to slow down copulation. Yes, naturally, people copulate to populate. But what is happening today is a big concern since the population is perceived excessive. Population growth is something that must be controlled to balance the population pyramid and that what the government has to strictly deal with, to create more stabilities and balances in the future.