Indonesia’s billion dollar climate experiment

Mother Jones: Robert Eshelman: 6 December 2010

Can rich nations pay a corruption-riddled government to protect its rainforests?

On a humid afternoon in Sungai Tohor, a coastal village in Sumatra’s Riau province, 50 or so men are packed into a town-hall conference room. They sit in neat rows of blue plastic chairs, many clad in knee-high rubber boots, loose-fitting polo shirts, and baggy pants—the casual uniform of an Indonesian farmer. Women and children peer in through open windows and doors. There’s excitement in the air, thanks to a gaggle of visiting journalists and enviros who have come to discuss the fate of the village—and a way of life now under siege.

Over multiple generations, residents of Sungai Tohor have built a thriving trade network that has brought them relative prosperity. Each month, they ship several hundred tons of sago paste—a starchy dietary staple produced from trees they cultivate in the jungle—to Malaysia and Java. The proceeds have enabled them to buy bright new motorbikes, build quaint homes, and maintain a slow-paced lifestyle that prioritizes family and community above all else. Some families can even send their children to college.

Last year, however, Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry told PT LUM—a supplier for the Singapore-based pulp and paper giant APRIL—that it could cut down nearly 26,000 acres of lush rainforest surrounding Sungai Tohor and replace it with acacia trees, used to make paper products. The proposed plantation overlaps with the sago groves and other areas that the villagers use to grow rubber and coconuts.

Among the town-hall speakers is Kaka, a slender, ponytailed man who works as an organizer for the Indonesian environmental group WAHLI. As he explains it, Indonesia is accepting cash from Western governments to protect its rainforests even as it enables outside corporations to destroy them. Back in May, in exchange for $1 billion from Norway, Indonesia’s president agreed to place a two-year moratorium on new logging permits. In theory, his administration is also supposed to work closely with locals to develop sustainable forestry practices—such as Sungai Tohor’s sago trade. But government officials have yet to address the villagers’ formal complaints.

The Norway deal is part of a broader United Nations program with an insufferably wonky title—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)—that aims to tackle climate change by paying developing countries to preserve their forests. Because the destruction of rainforests and their carbon-rich peat soils releases vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, and because the payoffs seem like a relatively cheap and straightforward fix, REDD is likely to be one of the hottest negotiation items at the current round of climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. Among the major sticking points: What, exactly, constitutes a forest? (Logging interests argue that their plantations should qualify.) And how much say will forest communities like Sungai Tohor have in the process? 

Back at the town hall, Nong, a gregarious sago mill owner, stands to speak his piece. “If this company comes in,” he says, “the sago groves will be destroyed and we will lose our way of life. Soon they will clear the trees and plant acacia. We will then lose the animals—the deer, the pigs.” He looks over at the foreigners. “We ask you to help us to keep our village, our food supply, our livelihoods.” He takes his seat amid murmurs of agreement and nodding heads.

The village secretary rises in turn to remind everyone what happened in 2003, when PT LUM received a similar logging concession nearby. The residents “rejected them in a harsh way,” vandalizing equipment and setting up security camps to protect areas they claimed as their own. When the government sent in troops to assist the company, the men grew infuriated. They marched to the house of their kepala desa (chief)—who had taken the company’s side—and burned it to the ground.

The new kepala desa stands with the villagers.

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Indonesia is an attractive target for international climate-change efforts, because it boasts the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest on the planet, and one of the most biodiverse—its emerald-green jungles are home to iconic endangered mammals like Sumatran tigers, elephants, rhinos, and orangutans. Some 30 million Indonesians also rely on the forests for subsistence, taking wood to build homes and boats, and animals to eat.

More to the point, Indonesia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, second only to the United States and China. The overwhelming majority—85 percent—of those emissions result directly from the conversion of jungle to agriculture. Since 1990, companies like APRIL and Sinar Mas have cleared nearly 91,000 square miles of mature Indonesian rainforest—an area larger than Minnesota—and planted acacia and a variety of palm whose oil is used in everything from breakfast cereals to cosmetics to biofuels.

Worldwide, this sort of land conversion generates more greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector, which is why wealthy nations, including the United States, are now handing over cash to curb the destruction. Much of the $4.5 billion pledged thus far is destined for Indonesia, where President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (Indonesians call him “SBY”) has vowed to cut overall emissions 26 percent by 2020—or more, provided the cash keeps coming.

That, however, would constitute a complete turnaround in Indonesia’s forest policy. For one thing, SBY recently pledged to increase acacia and palm oil production even while curbing deforestation, a seemingly contradictory goal; for another, the government has for decades handed out huge logging concessions to firms with close ties to “the military and state elites,” says Christopher Barr, a forest policy expert with the US-based consulting firm Woods & Wayside International. He adds that “corruption is widespread at all levels within the sector,” and powerful interests “have often displaced rural communities that have managed these resources for generations.”

Following the town-hall meeting, I’m whisked away on the back of a moped along a narrow, cracking concrete path—what passes for a road in these parts. I dismount in front of a single-story wood home where I’ve arranged to chat privately with Kaka and Alfian, the current kepala desa. Or not so privately, as it turns out: Alfian’s living room is like an auxiliary town hall, with dozens of villagers coming and going during our conversation—rushing to greet their chief with handshakes and smiles. Alfian, clad in a plaid shirt and neat black slacks, returns the good will, offering each man his hand and attentive gaze.

Even before Kaka got involved, Sungai Tohor had partnered with other villages under threat from paper companies and collected 30,000 signatures on a petition protesting the concessions—which WAHLI helped distribute to regional and federal officials. He hands over a thick stack of paper that includes the signatures, along with arguments detailing why the concessions are illegal and how they will destroy the local economy.

Some 60 percent of the targeted area, Kaka explains, is by law the villagers’ customary land. In addition to the sago areas, he says, PT LUM is preparing to clear areas of untouched rainforest that the company and the ministry falsely claim are “degraded.” (In a new report, Greenpeace warns of precisely such a ploy by paper and palm oil interests aiming to expand by rebranding their activities as land “rehabilitation.”) Already the company has cut a clearing just outside the village boundary, where it has dug several 20-foot-wide canals through the thick peat soils—another legal violation, he adds.

The canals, Kaka explains, are meant to drain the peat—acacias prefer dry soil—and to create a waterway that can be used to transport cut trees to the pulping mill. As the soil dries, so too will the sago trees, which thrive in the moist soil. “There’s already a drop in the water table,” Alfian says, based on his last excursion into the forest.

Kaka and Alfian suspect that PT LUM bribed government officials to secure the concession—this, they believe, is why the Ministry of Forestry has yet to review their petition. I ask the men whether, in the absence of a federal review of the permits, the villagers are prepared to confront the company as they did back in 2003. They turn toward one another, eyes wide. “We’re going to try to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Alfian responds. “We don’t want to use anarchistic or violent methods. We want to use democratic means.”

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After leaving Alfian’s, I go visit some sago mills on the village outskirts, where man-made structures give way to a lush wall of Sumatran rainforest. The harvested logs are floated here from deep in the forest by way of a slow-moving river that runs adjacent to the row of mills.

I watch a man strip dry brown bark from the logs with slow, deliberate heaves of an ax. Another worker, a cigarette dangling from his lips, chops the stripped logs into wedges, which are then fed into a pulping machine—its motor chuffing like a riverboat stuck in mud. The pulpy ivory-colored mass pours out of a rubber hose at the base of the machine and into a long rectangular pool where the starch is separated from the wood fibers. Next to the bath, dozens of sacks of sago paste stand upright and ready to ship. Surrounding each mill are piles of bark to be burned for fuel or used to make floors or fences.

Over at his mill, Nong, who is 66 but could pass for mid-forties, becomes animated when he talks about the setup. Rather than simply harvesting logs for prosperous mill owners, the farmers grow, process, and sell the paste themselves—paying mill owners a small sum for use of their machinery. “That way,” Nong says, “even families with only a few logs are still able to produce their own sago.”

Now that their economy is under threat, villagers are warily looking to the Norway pact for a strategic opening. The petition Kaka showed me plays up the role of forests and peatlands in mitigating climate change, and some farmers told me they were developing proposals for how REDD funds could be used to improve sago production. “We will support the government’s program,” Alfian explains, “but only if it goes to saving the forests.” 

That remains to be seen, of course. In late October, Wandojo Siswanto, formerly a top climate-change negotiator and architect of the Norway pact, was arrested and charged with accepting a $10,000 bribe to grant a company’s no-bid contract with the forest ministry. Siswanto told reporters that he was simply obeying ministry orders, a claim the government denied.

The buck now stops with Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, an SBY confidant whom the president has put in charge of implementing the Norway deal. Kuntoro enjoys a clean reputation, having supervised a $7 billion donor fund as head of post-tsunami reconstruction in hard-hit Aceh province. “We are now fighting very hard to have a country with high integrity,” Kuntoro told me. With “REDD and reconstruction in Aceh, we’ve proven that when it comes to starting from zero, we can design something different than what we had before.”

His definition of success is simple: lower emissions. But when I asked whether the government would reconsider concessions such as the one near Sungai Tohor, Kuntoro turned vague. “It all depends on where the concession is,” he said. “We are going to limit development on peat land; there are a number of factors that we have to consider before making a decision to review or not to review.” He would not elaborate.

PT LUM has yet to start clearing around Sungai Tohor in earnest. But unless the government does step in, there’s nothing to stop it from doing so. The company has doled out work to villagers here and there, but nothing that would make up for loss of their sago. Standing in the clearing alongside one of PT LUM’s canals, farmer Numun Daya grips his machete. “It was 1903 that my ancestors first opened land here. When I think of that time, I think of the hardship for them,” he says. “We have lost 13 areas of sago, and there is only a tiny bit of work from the logging company. We still have six more sago areas in danger.

“With those fields,” the farmer adds, “we have a future.”

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Robert S. Eshelman is an independent journalist. His articles have appeared in Abu Dhabi’s the National, In These Times and on TomDispatch.com.