Years of poor harvests mean many children in the region, where the climate can feel more like parts of arid Australia than lush Indonesia, are underweight and malnourished.
A report last year by the Church World Service and other organisations found 91 per cent of West Timor's children suffered from “food insecurity”, meaning they don't have access to regular and affordable nutritious food.
About 50 per cent of infants and young children were either moderately or severely underweight, compared to African countries overall, where 21.9 per cent of children were underweight.
Oxfam's West Timor program manager Aloysius Suratin said there was evidence the problem was growing worse, as farmers were at the mercy of more unpredictable weather patterns.
Mr Suratin said a review of the area's rainfall records for the past 13 years – the limits of available data – showed only 46 per cent fell in the expected rainy season.
”Because this is a dry area, people need water,” he said.
”They ask for rain, but when the rain comes rain creates a disaster. For the farmer, it's difficult to anticipate. The risk in farming is higher now.”
Rice farmer Petronella Baro, whose family was working on this year's harvest, said it was only yielding one or two tonnes per hectare if they were lucky, compared to four tonnes last year.
The mother of six children, aged from 17 down to an infant, agreed the rainy season was getting harder to predict.
This year, the rain came to her village of Desain, about 40km from Atambua, but it was so intense it washed away a nearby bridge.
Adding to the problem is that this family, like many others, relies on traditional farming methods.
The farmers said they waited for a moon “with a rainbow around it” to judge the right time to plant, then waited about a month for the ground to become muddy before sowing the seed.
”We just follow the rain,” Mrs Baro said. “But if it's like this again, it will be a problem for our family.”
Hunger is so common in West Timor that November to March is known as the “hungry season”.
But Mrs Baro said her children had enough to eat, as she was able to grow corn, cassava and beans when the rice began to dwindle, and the children were given priority at meal time.
Oxfam last month studied the village of Tes, 20km from Kefamenanu, where 90 per cent of the population are subsistence farmers.
Mr Suratin said the study aimed to find out how many families were having to sell their assets – usually land, livestock, woven clothes and coconut and teak trees – to survive a failed harvest.
He found the declining crop yield had reduced the village's meagre assets by 58 per cent, and that the district government would have to boost its funding to the village five times over to return residents to their former levels of well being.
Mr Suratin said the situation was the most severe in families headed by women, as they usually gave a share of their harvest to labourers, and were more likely to resort to selling assets.
”This is a clear portrait of the food insecurity condition and why I say it has become worse – not meaning that more people are in hunger conditions – but in the future, the value of their assets is limited ... they have not many options to recover,'' he said.
Oxfam is helping farmers trial basic rain harvesting, but says farmers need practical meteorological advice and an early warning system to help them prepare for dry spells.
The Australian government, through AusAID, has a $6.5 million program to address nutrition in women and children in the Nusa Tenggara Timur area, and also contributes to food programs run by other organisations.
