A Socio-economic Profile of Poor Communities at In-forest Areas and Economic Crisis in Indonesia

The issue of poverty and forest degradation rank highly on the present worldwide agenda and Indonesia is no exception. In response these issues we consider that researching poor people in forest area is a challenge subject in academic work. So the objective of the research was: (1) to describe the socio-economic situation of poor people at the in-forest community, (2) to describe the physical performance of the community situation and, (3) to describe the perception of the household about the economic crisis in the country. We randomly interviewed 60 households within in-forest community as a sample size. To meet these objectives we employed descriptive statistics as method of data analysis. There are some important findings in the research. They are: (1) human resource in the poor community was abundant in terms of labor force for agricultural purposes, but low in education attainment and tended to have children and family size in slight large number, (2) poor people at in-forest community tended to cultivate cash crops and had larger area in size, but low in production and land productivity, (3) job opportunity at the in-forest community did not vary in terms of the type of work, but within agricultural sector there were few variations in the job. And the poor people in the community mostly spent the their time for farming and extracting rattan from the forest, (4) the household head and Non-Wood Forest Products were the main contributor to household income by personal and factor contribution of income, respectively, (5) by taking housing performance and the availability of basic need as poverty indicator the in-forest community was struck by acute poverty, and (6) in the in-forest community, people perceived that their household economic situation in the time of the economic crisis was worse than before and they considered forest and hard-working as a first and important alternative to get cash in bad economic situation such as economic crisis