PSPK Siberut Barat Daya
PSPK stands for Pendataan Sapi Potong, Sapi Perah dan Kerbau, Cattles, dairy cows and buffaloes data collection. Just for simplicity, we call it Cattle Census. This is a joint project of BPS and Department of Agriculture which should accomplish on 30 June 2011. The project’s main goal is to have accurate data on cattle owners, by name by address, that’s considerable for Indonesia determination of meat self-supporting and import in 2014.
Easier than poulation census indeed, for the amount of cattle population in Mentawai Islands is inferred and in fact, LOW. Less than the data amount in the ‘main regions’ of West Sumatera, known as ‘TANAH TAPI’, where most people hereditarily develop their animal husbandry works.
People in Mentawai Islands mostly raise pigs and fowl through generations and live with traditional farming and fishing. Only a few of them put interest to maintain cows, usually for the reason of faith. Therefore, it’s not all the time easy to locate cows in a district. But we are the officers, first try to index where moslem cluster in a village and with snowballing method (that is to continue interview on other respondent based on the previous respondent’s remark), we collect the data.
The task is becoming a uniquely challenging because of personnel and funding limitation in addition to the ‘breathtaking’ sea nature of Mentawai Island that seems like to cancels all plans. We worry about the working quality under such situations. However, gathering with mentawai’s people is very useful in this context, as they frequently travel on the sea from ‘Kecamatan Induk’ or ‘Padang’ to their villages. We induct one or two them as staffs, we share many thing together to reach the task goal. This is a very valuable friendship.
A complete history. We both (KSK Siberut Barat Daya and Siberut Selatan) visited two of three villages (Pasakiat Taileleu and Katurei) in district Siberut Barat Daya since one or two weeks before, we couldn’t make any contact to these villages to recruit staff. Another remaining village in west coast of Siberut (Sagulubbek) was visited by a native, someone clever and educated that we just met on the ship, worked for us as partner. His homecoming and our luck were at once.
The census yields: 32 cattles and 0 buffalo. It takes at least Rp. 5,000,000 for operational expenses. I see this is ‘awesome’. Behind the overprice, lays the nation establishment. Statistics says.
A better story might come from a pig census. Anytime perhaps 
