The price of palm - Part 3
The oasis of Lasi Mudin
A few hours drive west of Lunjuk Village, Tungkal Satu is a small town of a few thousand residents where a handful of shops straddle a paved road. Zenzi Suhadi, my guide, grew up here, and the main objective of the visit was not to look further at the negative impacts of palm oil, but to talk to a man named Lasi Mudin — Zenzi’s father.
Mudin, a jovial man in his sixties who served for years as the headman of Tungkal Satu, has the easy authority of a man who has earned his old age. His home, with thin walls and an enclosed dirt-floored patio housing a well, a washroom and an open-air kitchen, was small and humble. But the garden surrounding it was extraordinary.
I followed Zenzi and his father as they climbed over a small fence into the yard, and I saw a miracle of tropical flora: ginger, lemongrass, coffee, banana, coconut, hibiscus and a dozen trees and plants I wasn’t familiar with. For the next hour, Lasi Mudin walked me from tree to tree and told me about each as the family water buffalo, an integral part of the farming system, lingered in the shade.
He began at a leggy coconut tree. “Coconut,” he said simply. “We eat it, we drink its water, we use the oil. There’s nothing wrong with the coconut.” He smiled and moved on, walking me to a fat, squat palm tree.
“Sugar palm. Once the fruit is ready I cut the trunk to extract the sugar, and I can harvest all day and sell it for a good price. When you need sugar, come to my house. I can give you sugar. But if we plant sugar palms like oil palm plantations, we’ll be in the same trouble we’re in with palm oil.”
As the old man led me through his garden, his delight was clear. The Areca nut tree, he told me, yields 5000 fruits every six months, and he harvests the shoots for pole-wood. Mangosteen has two benefits, he said: at harvest time, you can eat them and sell them for a good price and the skin is a remedy for malaria and typhoid fever. Teak grows quickly, does well with other trees, and the wood is worth millions of rupiah.
“I plant several of these trees and I have a bank,” Lasi Mudin said, patting the trunk of a slender teak. “Also, the Pelawi tree: it grows fast and when I cut it I can earn 25 million rupiah.”
He walked me into the shade of his durian tree – three-stories tall, spreading its broad canopy over the entire garden, and covered with burly, spiked fruits.
“This tree bears three thousand durians every six months, and each durian is worth ten thousand rupiah. Once it no longer bears fruit, the branches are big enough to sell for board. After the tree dies, another comes up in its place, just as good. This tree is great,” he said.
Our garden tour ended at a lone oil palm tree. Like everyone in the region, Lasi Mudin sells fresh fruit bunches of oil palm.
“They ripen reliably and they bring steady income,” he said. “But no need to just plant this one kind of tree.” He waved a hand across the garden. “This whole field used to be a coffee plantation. The coffee plants all got sick and died — this shows what happens if you rely on one crop. Now I have coffee, palm, sugar, durian, mangosteen, teak, you name it.”
The common sense of this — what’s called a mixed agroforestry system — is undeniable, both economically and ecologically. Like any crop, oil palm is not harmful in itself — but massive monocultures awash in pesticides and grown on lands taken from communities make it problematic. As Lasi Mudin taught me, it’s not the oil palm crop that undermines local subsistence economies, it’s the palm oil industry. And the resistance across Bengkulu and other regions makes clear that palm oil is not the blessing the industry claims it is.
In response, Walhi is taking the fight to the Indonesian government to review every palm oil company, supporting land conflict arbitration in federal courts, mapping community lands, and promoting agroforestry as a viable alternative to the industry.
Thousands of miles away, Friends of the Earth U.S. and the rest of the Friends of the Earth network are working with Walhi to build a campaign where the local meets the global. As we work towards cutting off the financial flows that drive this unsustainable industry, Walhi endeavors to redefine how a healthy agricultural economy can work in favor of biodiversity and human rights, not against them.
This article was originally published in an abbreviated form in the Friends of the Earth summer 2014 newsmagazine. Read parts one and two.
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