The price of palm - Part 1
Palm oil in Indonesia and the iron sands of Penaago
“In a nation sold to industry, where is the room for people?”
By Jeff Conant, international forests campaigner
As our small plane from Jakarta descended over the tropical hills and twisting brown rivers of Sumatra, Indonesia, the green grids of oil palm plantations were easy to discern from the darker, more variegated canopy of natural rain forest. From horizon to horizon, there was far more oil palm than jungle.
On the flight, my host Zenzi Suhadi, a slim thirty-year old campaigner with Walhi (Friends of the Earth Indonesia) shared stories of growing up in Bengkulu, the province we were about to visit. To people of an ecological bent, Bengkulu is best known for the Rafflesia orchid, the world’s largest flower. But Suhadi is quick to point out that the famous Rafflesia is just one of 178 orchid varieties here.
In a roundabout way, Suhadi said, the Rafflesia had determined his life’s turn toward environmentalism. As a child, the Rafflesia, with its huge red leathery petals and famously rank odor, seeded in him a fascination with orchids. Later, as a student of botany, Suhadi explained, his love of orchids brought him to the struggle against oil palm.
“In a natural forest,” Zenzi told me, “orchids have an extremely high diversity, but a very low display of each variety. In Bengkulu there are 178 varieties of orchids, pollinated by bats, bees, butterflies, geckos, and civet cats.” Their close symbiosis with trees, pollinators and soil biota, and their strong dependency on a precise balance of soil nutrients, temperature, sunlight, and water, make orchids an indicator species, telling when the ecosystem is out of balance.
“If you examine the areas around oil palm plantations,” Zenzi said, “you find only two or three species, and in great abundance, like an infestation.” Suhadi’s father, a traditional healer, showed him that the same species that thrive in industrial oil palm plantations have the unique quality of neutralizing poison in the body.
“Those orchids eat poison,” he said disarmingly. “So they love oil palm.”
“The ecology of most orchids is very fragile,” he told me. “But if you examine the areas around oil palm plantations, you find two or three species in great abundance, like an infestation.”
Suhadi’s father, a traditional healer, showed him that the same species that thrive in industrial oil palm plantations have the unique quality of neutralizing poison in the body.
“Those orchids eat poison,” Suhadi said disarmingly. “So they love oil palm.”
In the last decade, high demand for palm oil, largely for food and fuel production, has driven a rapid expansion of the industry — and the cheap supply has in turn driven further expansion. Illegal palm oil plantations in Indonesia and other tropical countries have become major drivers of rain forest destruction, which constitutes 15 percent of the total annual carbon pollution. And big yields come with big human costs: profits never find their way from the large, multinational corporations to the villages displaced by palm plantations through forced evictions.
Over the next several days, driving with Suhadi to the villages where Walhi works, I saw roads lined with oil palm trees, trucks carting the spiny red-yellow bunches of palm fruits from plantation to mill, ramshackle yards littered with picked-over palm-fruit remains. Traveling to Indonesia to tackle the palm oil problem, I realized, is like traveling to Iowa to tackle the corn problem: in this stretch of Sumatra, whether you are a small-scale farmer or a plantation manager, a truck-driver or a school teacher, your life and your livelihood, in one way or another, hinges on this crop.
Some see this as a good thing: many parrot the notion that palm oil is lifting developing countries out of poverty. Other groups, like Walhi, question the idea of basing an entire economy on an industrial monoculture that feeds on huge inputs of agrochemicals and water; that engenders ecosystem disruption and land takeovers; and that relies on corruption and violence to turn a profit.
Over the next several days, I visited subsistence farmers in several villages — those whom the industry claims to lift out of poverty — to get their perspectives.
The iron sands of Penaago Village
On the shores of the Indian Ocean just south of Penaago Village, the sand is streaked with veins of iron sand like black ribbons running down the beach. Mr. Jayan, one of the outspoken villagers here, told me this is iron sand that washes up seasonally, sometimes turning the entire beach black as pitch. The villagers have no use for the iron sand, Jayan explained. To the contrary, because it attracts mining companies, the mineral wealth here is more of a curse than a blessing.
Penaago Village is made up of people with local roots and “transmigrants,” moved here by a government effort to relieve population stress on nearby Java. Muslim, Catholic and Protestant, they live in dim wooden huts and feed themselves on what they grow. Despite religious differences and the challenges of blending newcomers with natives, an outspoken villager named Jayan told me, things were always relatively peaceful — until the mining company came.
“There was an iron sand mine run by a Chinese company,” Jayan recounted. “They started cutting forest along the ocean to dig out the iron. That forest is our only defense against tsunamis. So in 2008, we kicked them out.” Fighting off the mining company had the positive effect of uniting the community. Since then, the villagers were determined to survive on what they grow, despite the fact that a government-built irrigation systems had failed decades ago. But when a palm plantation company called Agri Andulas came, it took what was left of their irrigation water.
“When we had good irrigation we were able to grow rice, corn, green beans, vegetables,” Jayan said. “Now, nothing grows but oil palm.”
And, day by day, the oil palm company was taking more land.
Earlier, Suhadi had cited a figure: 85 percent of the forest area in Indonesia is controlled by timber, paper, palm and mining companies. In a nation entirely sold off to industry, he asked pointedly, where is there room for people?
Villagers pointed out that most of the large trees in their forest reserve had been girdled — a ring of bark cut around the trunks to cut off circulation and kill the trees. Next to each girdled tree was a palm oil seedling, innocently perking up from the forest floor.
“This is how the company takes land for its palm plantations,” Jayan said. “What’s worse is, they pay the villagers to do it, driving a wedge between friends and neighbors.”
Driving through seemingly endless stretches of plantation, we stopped periodically to examine the problems: oil palms planted right into waterways, disrupting the flow of creeks; drainage canals dug in carbon-rich peat soils to dry them out; abandoned homes where the company took over family farms by force.
“The company makes no attempt to bring us benefits,” Jayan said. “The company never gives a penny to the community.”
I asked Jayan what he wants for the village, if not the wealth that palm oil supposedly brings.
“To live in peace and prosperity,” he said. “I want to stop struggling against these companies.” He reflected a moment and added, “The most important thing is to keep the community united.”
This article was originally published in an abbreviated form in the Friends of the Earth summer 2014 newsmagazine. Read parts two and three.
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