February 19, 2009
After graduating from Brown, development studies concentrator Zara Rahman ‘07 served as part of a National Geographic Young Explorers project in Aceh, a province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra whose tropical forests are threatened by the palm oil industry. As an audio recorder, she gathered oral interviews with people affected by the local palm oil industry and captured the sounds of everyday life in the region’s forests and villages. She shared these sound bites, along with photographs from the research project and her analysis of Aceh’s environmental problems, during a recent talk at the Watson Institute: “‘Our Future is Gone’: The Local Impact of the expanding Palm Oil Industry in Aceh, Indonesia.”
Aceh, as Rahman explained, represents more than just another case of the pressures of conservation and economic growth coming to a head in a developing country. The province is home to one of the world’s largest contiguous tropical forests with high biodiversity. Additionally, roughly 4 million people live at the edges of the ecosystem and depend on the forest for their survival. A hereditary system of land rights based on community recognition traditionally allowed the Acehnese to farm and support themselves without lasting damage to the environment. Rahman, however, identified several trends that have disrupted this balance in the last few decades – war, logging and, most importantly, palm oil plantations.
The region saw a bloody guerrilla separatist struggle against Indonesia led by the Free Aceh Movement (often referred to by its Indonesian acronym GAM), which began in 1976 and did not cease until both sides saw an opportunity for cooperation in the aftermath of the 2005 tsunami. The war killed thousands and displaced many more. In the chaos of the conflict, palm oil plantations were able to occupy recently vacated lands easily. At the same time, Indonesia was trying to reassert control over Aceh and intensively bureaucratized the province, especially with regard to land ownership. These reforms put the majority of Acehnese, who held no written deed to their lands, at a disadvantage, and palm oil companies soon gained the legal rights to develop large areas of forest.
Palm oil is a common cooking oil in the developing world and can be found in a range of consumer goods from shampoo to chocolates in industrialized countries. When palm oil was discovered to be a potential biofuel, the Indonesian government aggressively encouraged the industry’s growth in Aceh. Although responsible harvesting of the palm fruit from which palm oil is extracted is possible, the plantations in Aceh leveled large tracts of virgin forest. Now, since the development of the palm oil industry has come at great environmental expense, many countries have cooled to the idea of Indonesian palm oil as an environmentally responsible source of energy, but expansion of the plantations continues unabated.
Deforestation takes a heavy human toll as well. Most Acehnese were farmers, cultivating crops within the tropical forest, and losing access to their traditional lands left many without a livelihood or resources. “Our land is our future; our land is our children’s future,” said Rahman, recounting how one interview subject described the predicament of his fellow farmers. “My future is gone if I don’t have land.”
Although some in Aceh hoped that the plantations would create jobs for locals and bring improvements to the region’s infrastructure and education system, most Acehnese report little benefit coming from the palm oil industry. Since traditional, small scale agriculture is no longer possible and palm plantations generally hire workers from other provinces, many displaced farmers have turned to logging as a new source of income, exacerbating the region’s already severe deforestation problems.
Rahman found hope for Aceh in what she called alternative livelihoods. For example, one farmer she encountered was able to support his family by growing rubber trees and coffee among existing trees. “Permaculture,” or growing varied crops rather than one type of cash crop for export so that farming communities are more self-sustaining, is another viable option. For efforts like these to be successful on a large scale though, farmers must gain leverage by being familiar with market prices. More importantly, Rahman argued, reform in agriculture and politics must be accompanied by an attitudinal shift. Aceh must acknowledge that building a rich and sustainable future means putting off short-term gains from palm oil or logging. “There are all these great ways to make agriculture more profitable,” explained Rahman. “But it’s never going to compete with the price you can get as an illegal logger.”
By Watson Institute Student Rapporteur Paul Wozniak ’09