An Indonesian forest community grapples with the arrival of the outside world

  • Globally recognized for its outstanding biodiversity and unique cultural heritage, the Mentawai Archipelago’s Siberut Island is under increasing pressure
  • Siberut Island, part of the Mentawai archipelago in western Indonesia, is recognized as a U.N. Biosphere Reserve due to its outstanding cultural and ecological value.
  • The traditions of the indigenous Mentawai people, including agroforestry and customary land tenure, have allowed the people of the island live off the forest without depleting it.
  • Roughly half of the island is protected as a national park. The rest, however, has been parceled out for timber and biomass plantations, road building, and the development of a special economic zone including a yacht marina and luxury resort.

DOROGOT, Indonesia — Toikot rises as the golden light of dawn begins to shine on the heavy mist that cloaks the rainforest canopy outside his home in Indonesia’s Siberut Island. The pigs leave their sleeping place under his traditional uma clan house and set out to forage in the forest. Later they will return to the farmstead to eat sago.

An elderly indigenous Mentawai traditional healer, or sekerei, Toikot’s first task of the day is to gather “something beautiful from nature” with which to adorn himself. Today he plucks two red flowers and places one behind each ear. A loincloth, elaborate tattoos and headdress complete the distinctive customary dress for which the sekerei are known.

Toikot’s home, the farming community of Dorogot, is a cluster of forest farmsteads on the eastern side of Siberut, around three hours’ walk from the nearest village, mostly through arduous lowland swamp forest.

Siberut is the largest island in the Mentawai archipelago, which lies 140 kilometers (87 miles) west of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The rainforest-swathed island has been isolated from the rest of Indonesia for half a million years, leading to an unusually high level of endemism. Two-thirds of the animals here are thought to be unique to the island.

This unique biological and cultural diversity was recognized in 1981 when UNESCO designated the island a Biosphere Reserve. This was consolidated in 1993 when Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry established Siberut National Park, spanning 1,905 square kilometers (736 square miles) and covering most of the island’s western half.

Now, though, both Siberut’s traditional lifestyles and its biodiversity are under pressure from a spate of development projects. While the western half of the island is largely protected, the northeast is already home to a sizable timber concession and a biomass forestry concession. The central government also has big plans to develop a special economic zone in the south, and a highway linking it to the forest concessions in the north. The local government and a private company also plan to bring electricity to villages via a biomass project.

Land ownership and logging

These development plans are already coming into conflict with indigenous traditions in Siberut.

Mentawai ownership patterns are complex, relying on ancestral history passed orally from one generation to the next. Land tenure is deeply entwined with extended family clan kinship patterns, which create ties between the indigenous Mentawai people. “A land certificate is not so important as here we don’t sell the land. We know the story about the land, so that’s like a certificate,” says Fransiskus Samapoupou from Madobag village, echoing a widely held view on land ownership among the Mentawai. A candidate for a major political party in recent elections, he made land rights one of his key campaign issues. (Final election results are still not in, but Fransiskus’s name doesn’t appear among the winners in an unofficial tally.)

These sophisticated land ownership patterns, however, are not generally recognized by the government, since they rely on oral tradition rather than state-issued paper titles. As a result, the government claims ownership of most Siberut lands, and has allocated huge chunks to big development projects.

The government has since 1969 used its claim over the land to award forestry and logging concessions in the Mentawai Islands. The current logging operator is a Sumatra-based firm, PT Salaki Summa Sejahtera, which was in 2004 awarded a 45-year, 47,605-hectare (117,635-acre) timber concession covering the northeastern part of the island. Only a narrow buffer zone separates the logging concession and the national park. As of 2016, the company’s annual extraction target was 64,000 cubic meters (2.26 million cubic feet) of timber, focused on valuable species such as meranti, keruing and nyato mersawa.

Activists say that logging has brought few benefits, and many hardships, to the community. “The economic situation of the community has not improved. Our investigation shows that some of the company’s social obligations are not carried out,” says Rifai Lubis, director of the NGO Citra Mandiri Mentawai Foundation (YCMM).

As of 2011, the company was working with the Borneo Initiative, a forestry certification platform, to achieve a certificate of sustainable forest management. However, NGOs including YCMM have blamed the logging operations for increased incidence of flooding in the concession areas in recent years. “Logging carried out by this company must be one of the causes of flood event,” says Lubis. “The occurrence of flooding is increasingly common, and the volume of water during floods is also increasing.” These floods damage crops and have even washed away houses, he says.

Biomass plantations

In Siberut’s central eastern area, a company called PT Biomass Andalan Energi (BAE) was in 2015 granted a 20,030–hectare (49,500-acre), 36-year concession to cut down rainforest and replace it with fast-growing exotic tree species for export as feedstock to be burned to generate biomass energy. Most of this concession abuts the national park. According to plans, three main species are due to be planted: kaliandra (Calliandra calothyrsus), gamal (Gliricidia sepium) and lamtoro (Leucaena leucocephala). Maps show a network of service roads due to be constructed on the concession.

“These invasive trees species grow easily and can displace native species. It is feared that they could disturb the trees and biodiversity of Siberut National Park,” Lubis says. YCMM has launched a petition against the project as part of ongoing advocacy efforts, which in 2016 saw local protests against the project on the island. In 2017 the district government reacted by recognizing traditional rights as a step toward granting customary forest status.

The YCMM petition, which calls on Indonesia’s president to revoke PT BAE’s permit, alleges that the biomass company acquired the permit without obtaining the consent of the local indigenous people, and that letters and petitions from tribal councils and Mentawai environmentalists, submitted in 2017, were ignored.

A previous petition to stop the company by Rainforest Rescue ended in May 2018 after drawing 245,576 signatures.

New road project

“I walk to Madobag once a week to see my grandson,” says Toikot.

His grandson, like many high school students, lives away from home because the arduous six-hour round trip makes a daily commute impossible. To market their farm produce, people living in the interior often make the longer and more expensive journey to the market at Muara or the port at Maillepet by motorized dugout canoe. Even so, Toikot is against the prospect of new roads in the area. “A road might make it easier to walk, but there would be more accidents with cars and motorbikes,” he says. “People’s chickens would get run over.”

A muddy walking trail is all that links the school village of Madobag to the outside world for now. But the route is set for a major upgrade. Work is already underway to build the Trans-Mentawai highway, a two-lane paved road running north-south along the eastern half of Siberut Island, with transport links to neighboring islands, passing through the villages of Rogdog, Madobag and Matotonan along the way.

As of April, only one river bridge and a few miles of paved road had been completed, in the Muara area, an hour by motorized canoe downstream from Dorogot. A second river bridge now nearing completion has taken eight months to build and abruptly stops on the south bank, where dense forest remains. A worker on the project told Mongabay he had been working on it for six to seven months, earning the equivalent of $5.70 per day.

“A big road would be good, but if it means cutting down my areca nut trees, the government must pay,” says Aman Derik Ogo, an elderly man at a trailside coffee shop in Mangaroot village, just beyond the current end of the paved road.

On the track towards Madobag, Kornelius Sakaliou disappears from the path and slashes weeds at the base of a huge durian tree towering some 20 meters (60 feet) high. “I inherited this durian tree from my grandfather who planted it years ago,” Sakaliou says. He adds he’s horrified that widening the track into a road could condemn his durian tree, and he’s not alone.

“The government must ask who the land and trees belong to,” says local politician Fransiskus. “I want people to get money for their land and money for their durian trees.” That he’s put this issue at the top of his agenda reflects the widespread concern here about compensation for land and property requisition.

Coastal development

Life in the forest contrasts starkly with plans by the district government to establish a special economic zone on the south coast. Key to this project is the Mentawai Bay Resort, a 2,639-hectare (6,521-acre) coastal development, for which Java-based firm PT Putra Mahakarya Sentosa was awarded a contract. According to the company’s plans, the resort will stretch across about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of beachfront and extend up to 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) inland, into what is currently a traditional farming area full of multi-cropped agroforestry gardens among the forest. The area that will be swallowed up by the project also includes a freshwater lake on which people rely for fishing, particularly during the stormy rainy season when rough seas make it dangerous for fishing boats.

The first phase of construction will focus on a 300-hectare (741-acre) airport, an adjacent harbor and yacht marina, hotels, and a theme park. In all, five beachfront hotels, villas and condominium towers will take up 900 hectares (2,224 acres). A golf course, zoo, eco-theme park, hospital, college, and industrial center are also planned. A spiritual area and cultural village are included in recognition of Siberut’s unique cultural heritage.

When it comes to recognition of land rights, however, the developers are lagging behind, says Lubis of the YCMM. “There is compensation given, but only for coconut palms. Whereas land is not compensated.” Lubis says the compensation varies depending on the number or coconut palms lost, and is paid out on an annual basis for five years. Local farmers are still holding out for a comprehensive compensation package that recognizes other assets such as fruit trees, and for now construction remains deadlocked.

Biomass electricity

In addition to these large, state-backed initiatives, projects at the local level are already having an impact. In March 2017, work commenced on a biomass power plant, developed by Jakarta-based PT Charta Putra Indonesia (CPI). According to its project portfolio, the company has plans to generate power from tourist trash in Bali and establish a biomass plant in Jambi, on the Sumatra mainland. The Mentawai Distributed Power project is the company’s flagship, a $12.4 million project financed by international donors including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), via the Indonesian government-administered Millennium Challenge Account (MCA).

In a 2018 presentation, founding director Jaya Wahono described biomass energy as a way to make use of the 20 million hectares [49 million acres] of degraded and marginalized lands in Indonesia. By harvesting just two to three bamboo poles per month, he said, households can meet their energy needs.

In the villages of Rogdog and Madobag, electricity meters freshly installed on the porch of each house remain a mystery to many people. In particular, people are unclear how the new electricity they have been receiving for the past year will be paid for.

“I don’t have an agreement with the company yet. They just gave me a hundred bamboo saplings to plant and 100,000 rupiah [$7] as payment for planting them,” says clan leader Aman Patdoini in Rogdog.

Wahono anticipates that after five years of growth, each seedling will yield 100 poles, equal to around 200 to 300 tons of bamboo feedstock per household. If that proves correct, the 200 households in Rogdog village would produce up to 60,000 tons of bamboo feedstock in five years, more than enough to cover the 2,555 tons required annually to fuel the plant at seven tons per day.

These estimates may be optimistic: instead of the monocrop plantation depicted in the company’s marketing materials, seedlings planted in one garden visited by Mongabay were interspersed among other crops, as is customary on the island. Several farmers also said that because they keep pigs they had given their seedlings to neighbors and helped plant them.

But most hope the sale of bamboo will be enough to cover their electricity bill. “It’s undecided whether they’ll have to pay for electricity,” says Gervasius Tasiriottoi of Rogdog village, who is in charge of keeping population records for the local government. “Maybe they can give harvested bamboo in exchange,” he speculates.

“For now, while staff training takes place, the generator is being run on gasoline. It will be switched to wood in a few months’ time,” says Tasiriottoi. The bamboo harvest is still several years away, though. “In the meantime the company are offering 300 rupiah per kilo [less than a cent per pound] for wood,” says Tasiriottoi. At the entrance to the 300-kilowatt power plant is a pile of logs gathered locally.

“There is plenty of wood, so for now they’re not cutting trees,” Tasiriottoi says. However not all agree, and there’s widespread concern about the impact the project could have on the remaining forest in the area. “There will be a four-year wait until the first bamboo harvest, so I worry the jungle will be destroyed because there is not enough wood. Wild pigs and monkeys will be affected,” says Aman Patdoini.

“Electricity is good, but if the company plant in my garden there will be problems,” says Aman Derik Ogo. “This is our land. Even for me I’m old already. If they grow bamboo everywhere, where can a person find their livelihood? No trees anymore, no medicine, no food. Water all gone. No more firewood. Nothing, because everything used in the biomass plant. No trees anymore so Mentawai people will die.”

An island at the crossroads

The Mentawai are a tight-knit tribe proud of their cultural heritage. Their forest-dependent customary beliefs and livelihood traditions have proven resilient over the ages, allowing them to live off the land without depleting it. Now, development projects are attracting a mixed reception from the Mentawai. While some benefits like electricity and transportation are broadly welcomed, concerns and suspicions about the negative impacts of development are widespread, and opposition is growing to projects that threaten the forest and cultivated gardens.

Back in Dorogot, life remains much as it has been for generations. To the untrained eye the multi-crop forest garden, where natural forest has grown around cultivated trees, could easily be mistaken for dense jungle. As the sun sinks in the sky and the pigs amble back in search of sago feed, Toikot leaps to his feet with a start. “Can you hear that eagle?” he exclaims. “It’s after my chicks.” The ambitious development plans about to take shape nearby seem distant for now, but for how much longer?
Citation:

Meyers, K., Pio, D., Rachmania, S., Hernandez, A. (2006) 25 Years of Siberut Biosphere Reserve: Saving Siberut and Its Unique Culture and Natural Heritage. UNESCO, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Published on Mongabay.com 

Stateless children of Borneo

A boy paddles using his shoes in an upturned aluminium washing-up bowl he is using as a boat offshore from Gaya Isand, Sabah, East-Malaysia. He is one of thousands of stateless people on Gaya island, mainly from the Bajau Laut community of sea-gypsies and immigrants from the Sulu area of The Philippines.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants live in Sabah, East Malaysia on Borneo Island. Some have lived there for many years and have families. Not eligible for official documentation they are stateless people. Lacking official recognition, children cannot attend state school and many end up with no education working in menial jobs. Others are exploited by traffickers. Many are Bajau sea-gypsies, others are immigrants from the Muslim Sulu area of Southern Philippines. Indonesian workers also come across the porous border from Kalimantan seeking work.

Many of the Bajau Laut sea gypsies have now settled in Sabah. Climate change, overfishing and poverty have caused them to give up their nomadic life on the sea in favour of the shanty towns of coastal Sabah. The presence of migrants has been tolerated because many are contributing work in the state. However in recent years a rise in Muslim terrorist activity at tourist resorts around the coast has made the government less tolerant towards the migrants and less inclined to provide residency papers. So these shanty communities remain in limbo, trapped in an insecure situation where they cannot progress.

This story follows children from the shanty villages of Gaya Island, offshore from capital Kota Kinabalu, as they fight, play and hustle for a living in the capital’s busy fish docks and markets.

Farewell old Shanghai

The central Shanghai district of Laoximen popular with tourists for its antique market and traditional stores, is being demolished to make way for modern development.

A stone’s throw from Laoximen in the trendy Shanghai neighbourhood of Xintiandi, a humble shikumen building has been preserved as a museum commemorating the first national assembly of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921. A humble wooden table surrounded by stools in the cramped room where the meeting took place is these days a closely guarded national treasure highlighting the humble origins of the Chinese Communist Party, less than a century ago.

Years later, in May 1949, the Communists entered the city and the opposing Nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek fled to Taiwan. Dynamic, sometimes tumultuous change is nothing new to Shanghai. In 1533, during the Ming dynasty, a wall was built around the growing city to protect residents from attack by Japanese pirates. The eight-metre high structure, demolished back in 1912 had ten gates into the city. The West gate (in Chinese called ‘Laoximen’) is now a central district, the city having since expanded far beyond its former limits.

In the early 1920s, competing colonial powers built showcase banking buildings and hotels on the riverside ‘Bund’ promenade. Meanwhile Laoximen followed central Shanghai in building ornate blocks of tenements. Sweeping away the old wooden houses these new buildings for the booming middle classes were a fusion of traditional Chinese styles and architectural features introduced by the colonists, distinctive narrow streets and courtyards which became known as the ‘shikumen’ style, literally translated as ‘Stone Gate’.

Shikumen would become Shanghai’s dominant style of residential architecture. Porcelain kitchen sinks were typically located in the narrow alleys outside the houses. Ornate stone features such as door lintels, roof gables, and carved wooden doors and windows increasingly adorned the brick buildings. Later, as styles evolved, buildings displayed art-deco features. Despite the increasing assault of modern development on its historical buildings, Shanghai still claims more art deco architecture than virtually any other city in the world. However, holding on to the styles and themes of the past is a battle that some traditionalists are finding it increasingly hard to fight.

UNDER THE ARCHES

A group of three locals sit under the arched entrance to the condemned Jian Road shikumen discussing their bleak housing problems. ‘It’s more than a hundred years since our ancestors came’, says Mr Zhou. ‘I moved here half a century ago,’ says Mrs Zhang.

Now in the narrow alleys there is an eerie silence and most homes are boarded up, their doorways covered in paper seals to prevent re-entry. The elderly Mr Zhou confirms that, ‘most of the people have already moved.’ He explains how people were encouraged by the developers to leave: ‘People were asked to move by January and those who fail to do so will not receive a compensation bonus.’ ‘Yeah we will stay here,’ says the group in unison. ‘They could not give the compensation we want so we won’t move,’ they declare defiantly.

The group is angry that the size of their properties by floor area is not being fully considered in their claims. ‘Let me give you an example,’ says Mrs Zhang. ‘Some apartments have two kitchens, but they won’t count this area, nor the balcony or bathroom. Only the living-room and bedrooms are counted.’ With information scarce, the neighbours are in the dark about their rights and compensation procedures. ‘I don’t know who they are,’ says Mrs Zhang when asked who she is negotiating with. ‘There is no government department to talk to about it. It’s the developers who talk to us, who say they are working through the government.’ She says that the developers asked them for trust, but she remains suspicious saying, ‘They don’t have a license and we don’t have a contract with them.’ She suspects that the government just wants to get rid of her at minimum cost: ‘We went to the municipal government office and they turned a blind eye to it. They only care how to sell the lot.’

The group claims the developer offered them less than half of the square metre value for equivalent properties in the area. On top of this, they have to pay 20 per cent to the government for leasehold management: ‘We moved here before the communist liberation,’ says Zhang, ‘then the houses became government property, and thus we became tenants.’

CARE HOMES

Mr Ye was born in Shanghai and moved to his alley house in the Jian Road shikumen in 1972. He works from home as an electrical repairman. Sitting in his small living room he explains his housing worries as he sorts through a box of old electrical components. ‘We have to move soon. Actually it’s overdue. We need to negotiate,’ he explains. ‘I have a very serious disease, haemophilia, and can only go to the hospital here for medical care. The Royal family in Britain also had that disease. People who have it are like a glass which is very fragile.’ He explains that he has to visit the nearby hospital every day for treatment. Commenting on the eviction process Mr Ye says, ‘They were quite brutal before. They would force you out by cutting the supply of water and electricity. It’s better now, at least they won’t cut you off and demolish forcefully when you’re overdue.’

When asked whether the government will provide alternative housing Ye says, ‘Yes they do but it’s quite far away. Still in Shanghai but in remote areas. We have to negotiate – we need special treatment because of my disease. It’s really expensive to buy a new house around here, the compensation is not enough. We [he and his wife] are both disabled, we can’t walk like normal people. She can walk but not a long way. It’s very convenient to live here but not the new place. I can only get medical care in the centre.

Other hospitals don’t have the medicine for my disease. I told the authorities about our difficulties but they said according to the policy, people will only get houses in suburban districts. People did get houses in the centre in the old days but not now.’ Ye flicks through a thick catalogue of new build high-rise properties available in the outlying suburbs just being constructed. It’s as thick as a telephone directory. All of them are far from the centre. Time is pressing and Ye and his wife feel stressed about the urgency. He’s worried that the lack of attention he is receiving could be life threatening: ‘They have to make sure it’s not worse than we are now. Otherwise it’s risking my life, because I can’t get medical care in time. It will take at least two hours to get to the hospital from there. I’ll already be dead after two hours.’

MARKET FORCES

Cutting through Laoximen is Dongtai street which has been an antiques and flea-market since the 1980s. Featured in many Shanghai guidebooks, it is a popular destination for tourists and locals who come to browse the 150 or so stalls hunting for bargains. The market is itself a product of the city’s immigrants. Many of the items for sale are cast-offs from settled migrants who no longer have need of them. At one stall a huge pile of old suitcases is testament to the stream of workers who continue to arrive. At another, a pile of Mao’s Little Red Book are unwanted reminders of the disastrous cultural revolution which most wish only to forget. Mao-era posters and magazines display fading images of communist realism – a bygone ideological dream, sitting among the crumbling façades of the shikumen buildings with their colonial story.

Many of the traders have moved no further than this market street since they originally arrived. Stallholders describe how the trinkets they had brought from their home-towns proved popular, and soon they were bringing more stock from visits home to the provinces. Among the personal ephemera can be found fixtures and fittings from glazed roof tiles to enamel door numbers, all scavenged from the rolling demolition of the old shikumen neighbourhoods across the city.
Now scavengers are busy in Laoximen itself. In a bitter irony, signs from the neighbouring streets can be found on the stalls, themselves slated to soon be swept away. As the still-ongoing demolition of Laoximen proceeded alley by alley, courtyard by courtyard, the bulldozers and demolition crews grew ever closer to the market itself, still open for business. Most recently, the houses that lined Dongtai street were smashed apart leaving only the street stalls remaining, surrounded by piles of rubble.

One stallholder explained, ‘We are moving very soon. We have meetings in a couple of days. At the end of the month we will know how much we are going to get compensated. I’m not sure where I am going. I am selling everything at a cheap rate.’ In one block, already long since flattened, people hold out in a last solitary building – their semidemolished home – refusing to relocate, holding out for better compensation. Stallholder Mr Guo says, ‘They asked me to close before the end of March, but I protested. I need compensation you know – it’s normal. It’s reasonable if you stop my life source. The government sells the land for billions of money. We need our life.’

An indigenous woman who has been selling ethnic textiles for 30 years says she has no idea where she will move her stall to and she asks for suggestions. Mr Guo says he looked into another market option but the rents were high in comparison. Most stallholders say they will not be moving on, but instead will be closing their stalls for the last time the day the market ends. As a result many have reduced prices to clear their stock. ‘Now it’s a clearance sale, I can’t take everything home, my home is full of antiques already,’ says Mr Guo, and he explains that now he plans to travel the world. It presents a big life change: ‘I was born here and have been here all my life.’ A neighbouring stallholder says, ‘I’ve been here about 20 years. The street has finished its historical mission.’ For many inhabitants of ‘old’ Shanghai, that same sentiment applies to the city as a whole.

Burmese days

A boy cycles through a pagoda near Inle lake, in Shan state.