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How Postcards Solved The Problem Of Disappearing Rice - NPR
Imagine if you had a rice delivery system that was supposed to deliver grain from point A, a government warehouse, to point B, homes of low-income residents.
But for every 100 kilos of rice that left the warehouse less than 50 kilos were actually reaching people's kitchens. This was the situation in Indonesia for nearly two decades as the government tried to provide a nutritional safety net to the nation's poorest citizens.
The program called Raskin, or Rice for the Poor, was set up in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Its goal was to deliver subsidized rice each month to Indonesia's most vulnerable households.
"It's an enormous program," says Abhijit Banerjee, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who's studied the Raskin program for years. "Indonesia is one of the biggest countries in the world. And this is their largest social support program."
Imagine if you had a rice delivery system that was supposed to deliver grain from point A, a government warehouse, to point B, homes of low-income residents.
But for every 100 kilos of rice that left the warehouse less than 50 kilos were actually reaching people's kitchens. This was the situation in Indonesia for nearly two decades as the government tried to provide a nutritional safety net to the nation's poorest citizens.
The program called Raskin, or Rice for the Poor, was set up in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Its goal was to deliver subsidized rice each month to Indonesia's most vulnerable households.
"It's an enormous program," says Abhijit Banerjee, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who's studied the Raskin program for years. "Indonesia is one of the biggest countries in the world. And this is their largest social support program."