A cashew nut farmer on the island of Flores, located in the Nusa Tenggara Timur province of Indonesia. Photo: jasperwiet (flickr)

Indonesia is setting its own poverty line at less than $1 a day. When a country comes up with its own definition of "poverty", can global policy makers trust it.

Indonesia’s equation to measure its own poverty line is based on a series of calculations for what poor people spend money on — including housing, food, education and health care, also accounting for cost differences between urban and rural areas, according to a recent blog post from The Economist. And conveniently, this homegrown equation says only 30 million out of Indonesia's 245 million population live below the poverty line.

What the equation doesn’t account for is more important. From 2004 to 2009, during which Indonesian GDP per capita shot up 38 percent, the World Bank's estimate of Indonesia's poverty rate fell only slightly, from 16.7 percent to 14.2 percent. The Indonesian poverty equation doesn't capture the deep socioeconomic differences between urban and rural areas that has preserved this inequality.

Despite Indonesia's efforts to eliminate statistical poverty, the facts are clear — 100 million Indonesians still live under $2 a day. Considering the World Bank sets the poverty line at $1.25 a day, the Indonesian government's insistence that only 30 million are living in poverty becomes clouded.

Although countries creating their own measurements for the poverty line may be useful, in the Indonesian case it seems wrought with discrepancies. Setting the poverty line below $1 a day may look good on paper, but doesn’t help those who are struggling and certainly can’t be utilized on an international basis.

Over one billion people live on less than one dollar a day, according to the U.N. But what can you actually buy with a dollar?

It seems like something that would vary across countries. Luckily, the World Food Programme recently released a series of videos in which it seeks to answer that question. Country specialists in Nepal, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guatemala, Somalia, Kenya, and the Philippines each went to their local markets with the equivalent of about one U.S. dollar and attempted to put together a meal. Watch as Reem Nada visits a market in Alexandria, Egypt.

The shorts are entertaining, but present a rather bleak reality. Almost all of the investigators come up short nutritionally. In Nepal, Deepesh Das Shresta leaves the market holding a few small bananas and a loaf of white bread. Meat is categorically too expensive, and staying within budget means many investigators can’t purchase all of the components necessary to create the meals that are considered cultural staples. It appears that those living on less than a dollar a day are also living far below their daily caloric and nutrient requirements.

Feeding oneself on less than a dollar is tricky business under the best of circumstances. Even worse, the recent volatility of the price of staple foods such as rice has jumped three times since 2008, says the New York Times — meaning that dollar must now be stretched even further.

The rest of the videos can be found on the World Food Programme website. The videos for Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Philippines are listed separately.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Eating on a dollar a day. For two eager Californians, it was an experiment. But for nearly a billion people in the developing world, it’s a daily reality.

The one-dollar diet project started as an attempt to cut grocery costs, say Kerri Leonard and Christopher Greenslate. The couple also wanted to get their friends and family thinking about world hunger issues. The World Bank estimates that 969 million people in the world get by on less than $1 a day.

To feed themselves for a month, Leonard and Greenslate bought rice and beans in bulk and made everything from scratch. Eating less meant eating less healthier — most of the time, they couldn’t afford fresh produce.

The project stirred a healthy conversation on the couple’s blog, ranging from supportive culinary tips to criticism that the two were eating — but not living — in true poverty. Poor people who can’t afford food also struggle, for example, to get fuel for cooking, Dartmouth professor Susanne Friedberg told the Christian Science Monitor. And how far a dollar reaches depends entirely on one’s environment.

“If you live on a dollar a day and you have land and enough hands to work it and the rains are good, the dollar is irrelevant,” Friedberg said. “If you live in a city and depend on the market for food, then you are really suffering.”