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The Jakarta Post


The Jakarta Post, June 05, 2006

Recognizing 'adat' rights to preserve land

Harry Surjadi, Contributor, Bogor

In the middle of each year -- usually in March, April, June and sometimes in July -- we often read press reports about droughts in some parts of the country.

In March 2005, for instance, The Jakarta Post reported that drought hit 12 regencies in East Nusa Tenggara and West Nusa Tenggara provinces, drying up hundreds of hectares of paddy fields. In June the same year, there were reports about drought in Gunung Kidul regency, Central Java. Cassava crops failed and people struggled to look for water as most of their wells had dried up.

Indonesia experienced severe droughts in 1982, 1983, 1987, 1993 and 1994.

Still, we hear more reports about floods than droughts. We experience more rain than dryness, since we are located on the belt of tropical rain forests. Only some areas on the northern coast of East Java, North and Southeast Bali, most areas of Nusa Tenggara, Central Sulawesi, and South Maluku are categorized as dry with rainfall ranging from 500 to 1,800 mm per year.

Rain forests are very humid with rain occurring throughout the year. Thanks to the plentiful rain and humidity, we never consider that perhaps one day our degraded rain forests and other forests will turn into deserts. In a 2005 report, the Ministry of Forestry stated that Indonesia's deforestation rate had reached 2.84 million hectares per year. Citing satellite data, the ministry said the country's forestry areas total 133.57 million hectares, all of which will disappear within 47 years at the above-mentioned deforestation rate.

What happens if the forests disappear? Will deserts replace them?

Scientists say that a forest ecosystem controls the runoff of surface water with trees maintaining cooling shade, and the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide by photosynthesis maintaining the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. No one knows exactly what will happen if Indonesian's tropical forests are completely destroyed. According to the ministry, degraded and critical land in the country in 2006 reached 59.5 million hectares. And degradation will increase if more trees are felled.

If a small area of tropical forest is cut down, the temperature of the area will fluctuate from extremely hot during the day to cool at night. If deforestation affects a quite large area, the area's weather pattern will be altered. We do not have to cut down large tracts of forest to feel the weather change. Bogor is a good example. As more and more people have moved to Bogor, more trees have been cut down, and now it is hotter in Bogor than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

Rain forests are not highly fertile. Fertile soil is made up largely of humus, the partially decomposed remains of plants and animals. Nutrients in rain forests are locked in the tissue of live plants. The top-soil in rain forests is very thin. Every year tons of leaves and dead plants fall onto the forest floor. This organic matter quickly decomposes since high temperature and moisture are ideal for decomposer organisms. The decomposed matter becomes top soil. But the minerals released during the decomposition process are rapidly taken up again by plants, and so almost all the nutrients of the forest are locked within the bodies of living organism.

When rain forests are cut down and converted into agricultural land, the small quantities of nutrients in the top soil are rapidly depleted. In many cases, the soil bakes into a rock-hard layer within a few years, and then the agricultural land must be abandoned. When traveling across Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, by plane, white sand can be seen along the sides of the road from the airport to your hotel. Imagine if Kalimantan no longer had any forests. Would the island become a very large desert? Would it become arid? Maybe. Should that happen, it may take centuries for the forests to regrow. If the damage is severe, the forests may never grow again.

In order to deal with desertification, the Earth Summit in 1992 proposed the signing of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Indonesia has no deserts, except for some "sandy areas" in Parangtritis and Bromo and dry land in some parts of the country. Most of the world's deserts are located in Africa. Yet Indonesia signed the UNCCD on Oct. 15, 1994 and ratified it on Aug. 31, 1998. Now 191 countries have ratified the UNCCD.

To stress the importance of the threat of desertification, the 58th ordinary session of the General Assembly of United Nations declared 2006 as the International Year of Desert and Desertification. And the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) has selected "Desert and Desertification" as a theme of Environmental Day 2006, with the slogan "Don't Desert Drylands!".

UNEP's executive director Klaus Toepfer said in a press release, "Land is -- next to water and air -- the very base of all life. But unlike air and water which can be cleaned up and rehabilitated, once soils are lost it can take millennia for nature to recreate them."

Many people misconceive desertification as a natural expansion of existing deserts. In fact, desertification denotes land degradation: the loss of lands' biological and economic productivities. Desertification is the process through which a non-desert environment is transformed into a desert environment. It is a gradual process of soil productivity loss and the thinning out of the vegetation cover because of human activities and climatic variations such as prolonged droughts and floods. Vegetation degradation affects cropland and rangeland as well as forests.

The WorldWatch Institute estimates that the Earth's landmasses lose as much as 24 billion tons of top soil every year. It has potentially devastating consequences in terms of social and economic costs.

Among human causal factors are over-cultivation, overgrazing, deforestation and poor irrigation practices. Such over exploitation is generally caused by economic and social pressure, ignorance and drought.

What should we do then to combat land degradation? Because poverty forces the very people who depend on land for their livelihoods to overexploit their land for food, energy, housing and source of income, and land degradation is both the cause and consequence of poverty. The government must address poverty at the core of its strategy to combat land degradation.

The government has failed to protect the forests. But adat (traditional) people have proven that they can manage their adat forests sustainably. The Dayak Iban tribe of Utik River in West Kalimantan has preserved its 9,452 hectare forest while forests in surrounding areas have been severely degraded due to logging.

Like many natural resource-dependent communities of indigenous people around the world, they are legally marginalized. Their indigenous rights have been subordinated by the state, often to powerful business interests that constantly encroach on their ancestral lands.

Now the government must take into account the social structures and land ownership. Indigenous or local people need some security of tenure to protect and manage forest areas. The recognition of community-based adat or customary property rights and the promulgation and institutionalizing of fair resource management policies are keys to sustain the richest of Indonesian forests. Therefore, in the spirit of combating land degradation, it is time to hand over forestry lands to the original owners. Put the indigenous people in the center of the efforts to combat land degradation.

The writer is a freelance environmental journalist and executive director of the Society of Indonesian Environmental Journalists.

All contents copyright © of The Jakarta Post.
 


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