Until a few years ago, Kalvin P. Boso was still known as the king of slash-and-burn in his village of Lonca, tucked away in Central Sulawesi’s Sigi district.
Lonca is located just eight kilometers from the district capital, Kulawi, but the road connecting the town to the village is narrow, muddy, with a deep ravine on one side and a rocky mountain on the other, all surrounded by protected forest.
Like most villagers in Lonca, Kalvin learned to cut trees and burn them down to clear the land as a child, unaware of the risks his actions created.
When trees are present, their roots help to prevent erosion by holding the soil together and absorbing water. With the roots gone, soil can slide around a lot more and water is able to build up on the surface, causing flooding and other natural disasters such as mudslides.
The practice also threatens the local water supply by damaging the soil’s ability to retain water.
“My parents were also farmers, and from when I was a student I was taught how to clear the land without understanding the consequences to the environment,” Kalvin, now 44, tells the Jakarta Globe.
Every year, Kalvin said, he cleared at least two square kilometers of forest to grow rice, corn or cassavas.
“Our villagers have been blamed for causing the floods in Palu every year,” says Amos Sumutju, the Lonca village chief referring, to the provincial capital.
Most villagers make it a habit to clear land and move on again the next year because they believed the soil is no longer fertile after a single season. This has placed their own lives in danger of disaster because of the growing expanse of critically degraded land.
Plan of action
The Forestry Ministry says more than 27 million hectares of Indonesia’s forests are now in critical condition due to illegal deforestation.
But land clearing by fire was stopped in Lonca village when the government introduced a program called Strengthening Community-Based Forest and Watershed Management to raise public awareness about illegal logging.
The program was established with the help of the United Nations Development Program, which, along with the Global Environment Facility, donated $7.5 million for the period 2009-2014 to revitalize watershed management in six locations in Indonesia by involving and empowering local inhabitants.
The six locations chosen for the project are in the provinces of North Sumatra, Lampung, Central Java, East Nusa Tenggara, West Nusa Tenggara and Central Sulawesi.
“We first started out by approaching the locals,” says Erus Rusyadirus, the regional facilitator for the program in Central Sulawesi.
“I stayed for at least three days in every village, talked and spent time with the villagers, trying to convince them that slashing and burning trees was bad for their present and future.”
Hearts and minds
“It was very hard at first. A farmer once told me ‘I don’t care if you or the government tell me to stop cutting trees, I will not stop. Who can guarantee my livelihood or if my family can still eat the next day?’” Erus said.
After intensive guidance, many of the farmers, including Kalvin, began to understand that their village was in danger.
“Kalvin, who used to be known as the king of slashing and burning, is now the head of the community-based organization,” Amos said, referring to a group set up under the program.
The CBO receives a small grant for the program, which it can use to fund its activities. Every CBO has different programs, but focuses mainly on empowering the locals to find a new source of livelihood so that the farmers do not have to go back to slashing and burning trees.
Kalvin, for one, says the program has changed his life for the better.
“After listening to Pak Erus’s explanation about how clearing the land with the old method has put many people’s lives in danger, I started to realize how much I loved the environment, and as the leader of the group I feel a deep sense of responsibility to conserve the forest,” he says.
Along with the other CBO members, Kalvin works to raise awareness in his village and urges locals to farm on a permanent plot of land rather than clear new land each year. Most people in Lonca now grow cocoa and vegetables.
The group, with 16 other CBOs in Sigi, has also planted 240,000 tree seedlings.
“If you came to our village a few years ago, you’d see the whole area was brown. But now as you can see, it’s all turning green,” Amos says proudly.
Community empowerment
Residents in Simoro, in Sigi’s Gumbasa subdistrict, have proudly embraced their new livelihood and work enthusiastically to develop various activities improve the economic status of their village.
“Everything started to change in 2004 when our village was flooded and we saw giant logs floating everywhere,” says Herry, the head of the Gumbasa CBO.
Gumbasa was severely affected by flash flooding that year, which swept away several homes.
“At that time, slash-and-burn clearing was still very common. People would clear the land and started farming anywhere they wanted to,” Herry says.
“We even cleared land inside the Lore Lindu National Park.”
Lore Lindu, east of Lonca, is a protected forest area that was designated as part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Network of Biosphere Reserves. It spans 2,180 square kilometers and is home to numerous rare species, including 77 birds endemic to Sulawesi.
CBO groups around it were taught to make the best of their environment by cultivating honeybees, cows and chicken. They also grow vegetables and fruit, as well as producing snacks from the produce to sell in Kulawi.
To be able to join their local CBO, each person has to plant at least 15 trees in a watershed area.
The village has planted nearly 70,000 seedlings along the riverbanks since 2011, and an evaluation shows that more than 60 percent are growing well.
Simoro village has also issued a regulation that farmers can still farm in Lore Lindu as long as they are committed to preserving the environment.
“If they want to use the land inside the national park, they have to plant at least 50 trees and they have to promise they will not cut a single tree inside the protected forest,” Herry says.
The CBO there has done so well that it was named the best CBO in Indonesia during an award ceremony in Bali recently.
Localization
Saeful Rachman, the national program manager of the SCBWFM, says the project was created after a report was published about critically degraded watershed areas in Indonesia.
“Some changes happened because of natural disasters like floods, climate change and landslides, but most were due to illegal logging,” he says.
Saeful says the Forestry Ministry has started replanting trees, but its program is not very successful due to rapid population growth and declining vegetation area.
“Most of the time the watershed areas are degraded because of land conversion,” he explains.
Therefore, he says, the UNDP and the Forestry Ministry proposed the program to increase awareness and empower communities so they can find another source of livelihood that is sustainable.
“Most farmers were very skeptical at first when we introduced the program, but when we asked them to be the main actors and the agents of change instead of the subjects, we saw significant progress,” Saeful says.
“Not only did they stop cutting down trees, but the villagers actively started working on regulations to punish illegal loggers. We are so proud of them.
“The locations were chosen because of their biophysical conditions and the local government’s readiness to implement the program,” he adds.
Persuading the locals to stop slashing and burning was a tall order.
In Omu village, also in Gumbasa, the program had to deal with an indigenous tribe that had been living inside a protected forest for generations.
Aris Pasasa, the leader of the local CBO, says that when the project first started there were 13 families from the indigenous tribe living inside the forest.
“They had been living inside the protected forest since the 1960s, and every year they moved to a new location and cleared land,” Aris says.
“Approaching them was a difficult thing to do, not only because they did not speak Indonesian, but also because they would hide every time they saw someone who was not from their tribe.”
With much effort and the help of a translator, the CBO finally managed to persuade the families to move out of the forest. Aris even lent his land to the families to build huts and got other residents to hire them to work on their land.
“Now we worry less about flash floods or polluted and damaged water sources,” Aris says.
Additional goals
Saeful says the main objective of the program is not only to improve the condition of the watershed area, but also to push for the government to give its support and encourage local officials to come up with regulations that help the environment.
Aside from community empowerment to stop people from cutting down trees, the program also asks the communities to restore the critically degraded areas to pristine condition.
“Every year we plant 450,000 to 600,000 seedlings provided by the government, but the really special thing is that sometimes the villagers themselves are even willing to spend their own money to buy the seedlings and plant them, and that’s a very good sign,” he says.
