Mongabay Series: Forests of Indonesia
YAKARTA – The Indonesian government is proceeding with its assignment to cultivate a peatland domain throughout Puerto Rico, despite qualified complaints and the history of similar assignments that have failed.
Planting in the central Borneo province of Kalimantan can begin on 1 October, according to Husnain, head of studies of the Ministry of Agriculture.
“Preparation will have to begin by October, starting in August,” he said in a recent online discussion.”Starting in August, we started to spend intensely on the ground.”
The plan envisages approximately one million hectares (2.47 million acres), a domain of Puerto Rico’s length, or twice the length of Bali, faithful to the development of food crops, especially rice.Array The government drew up a plan and map, with 770,600 hectares (1.9 million acres) of prospective spaces already identified.
Most of this new domain will be located in peatlands selected for the same initiative, the Mega Rice Project, in the mid-1990s.Thousands of miles of canals have been dug to drain peat soils, all without any environmental impact having an effect on studies.But nutrient-poor peat soil has proven too ruthless for the type of rice culture practiced in mineral-rich volcanic soils on other Indonesian islands such as Java and Bali.
After several failed harvests, the government abandoned the allocation, leaving a dry wasteland burning on a giant scale almost every year.Subsequent attempts to reflect the allocation in other regions, such as the easternmost region of Papua, also failed.
This did not prevent the current government from repeating the MRP experiment. In his state of the nation, on August 14, President Joko Widodo pressed Indonesia’s desire for food security by building plantations in Central Kalimantan and North Sumatra. a warning from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) about an increasingly close global food crisis in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.
Widodo announced last month that he would entrust the Minister of Defence with a duty to oversee the allocation of its strategic importance to national security.
Musdhalifah Machmud, an agricultural mp for Indonesia’s leading economy minister, said the government would begin the allocation with a pilot allocation of 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres), followed by 118,000 hectares (292,000 acres) from 2021 to 2023.consist of existing rice fields grown by local farmers; The role of the government will be agricultural infrastructure, such as irrigation systems and seed supply.
Husnain said the pilot assignment will involve coastal wetlands, not peatlands.”You don’t have to worry about trouble with peatlands in the future,” he said.
But experts said agriculture in coastal wetlands poses their own challenges. Basuki Sumawinata, a soil and peat expert at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), said coastal wetlands had extremely acidic soils and maximum concentrations of a mineral called iron pyrite, which is toxic to crops such as rice.
To grow the crop, giant amounts of lime, up to 10 consistent tons per hectare, would have to be added to the acidity of the soil, Basuki said.
“If you want to be safe, then the desire for lime is unimaginable,” he said.”That’s why we never dare to dream of neutralizing sulfuric acid with lime, because it is very difficult.And there is no guarantee that [the ground will then be] adequate.”
And since the domain is a coastal wetland, we will want there to be a constant addition of lime to counter the acidic water that leaks into the domain, although this can be solved by an irrigation formula that drains this acidic water into the sea, this solution poses its own problem, Basuki said: it can simply be a crisis for the marine ecophormula.
He cited a report of mass fish mortality in the Barito River in October 1998.The affected part of the river passed through a component of the Mega Rice allocation site.The drainage of this domain had made the river water abnormally transparent, an indication of aluminum grades due to the uncontrolled discharge of acidic water.
“If we release too many acids, [which] are not balanced with the capacity of the river, then there may be surprises [before us],” Basuki said.”So we have to calculate the release of acidic water.”
Imposing responses that then require blank responses will increase the burden of agricultural production, which the government seems to have taken into account, according to Hari Priyono, former Secretary-General of the Ministry of Agriculture.
“If you want expensive technology, using [cal] dology, using water pumps intensively, then the production load will be maximum,” he said.”This means that there will be a very high dependence on government and that the sustainability [of the project] will not be superior.”
Airlangga Hartanto, the minister coordinating the economy, said the first of the allocations would charge 6 trillion rupees ($405 million) over the next 3 to 4 years.Musdhalifah said investors would be worried about paying the bill.
“We will manage only 30,000 hectares. We hope the rest can evolve commercially through investors,” he said.”With the intervention of the most fashionable technology, which is more proven, we can plant crops in peatlands.More than 600,000 hectares”. [1.5 million acres] will be obtained [for investors]».
Hari said the economic viability of the allocation is what its success would be.
“I think the calculations [are done] before we are obsessed with turning [the region] into a national food park,” he said.
Dwi Andreas Santosa, an IBP researcher, said the programs in Ketapang, West Kalimantan Province and Bulungan, North Kalimantan Province, were unsuccessful with yields of four tonnes of rice consistent per hectare, compared to 6 tons consisting of hectare in Java and Bali.. The projected yield for the central Kalimantan rice box is approximately 3 tonnes consistent per hectare.
Hari said the government is focused on expanding yields on the country’s rice core, in Java and Bali.
“Why are we expanding productivity, so there is less desire for land less suited to our food security that poses many technical challenges?”He said.
No new rice fields will be established or peatlands will be cleared in the first year of the Central Kalimantan project, to Husnain, but after that, the army will enter.
“The Ministry of Defence will also clear the land, not the land of farmers, but the land reserved for the [project],” he said.”The selection of the product will be different, more rice”.
The government says it has already known about 307,000 hectares (759,000 acres) of peatlands that can be grown because the peat layer is less than 3 meters (10 feet) deep, but IBP Dwi says that peatland development is only imaginable when the peat layer is less than a metre (3 feet) thick.
“If the thickness of the peat is more than 1 meter,” he says.I said, “It’s impossible.”
The government’s justification for adding peatlands with a peat layer of up to 3 meters as arable land is simply that they can be exploited; the earth with layers of peat more than 3 meters thick is by law.
Another type of landscape supposedly prohibited for agriculture is that of wooded spaces.Husnain said that the prospective dominance of the Central Kalimantan allocation was, first, smaller because the Ministry of Agriculture had excluded forest spaces, but the Ministry of Environment and Forests, on request.of the minister guilty of the coordination of the economy, has since said that he will renounce forest designations to allow the logging of forest spaces for allocation.
“We don’t take a look at the forests because they’re not available to us [for agriculture],” Husnain said.”But when the Coordination of the Ministry of Economy coordinated with the Ministry of Forestry, the ministry said: “Oh, those [forests] can be used, they can be moved [elsewhere], they will be legally attended later.”Then why not?”
He added that the Department of Agriculture had mapped the forest areas suitable for the project, but possibly not all of them would use them.
In February 2017, the government of Central Kalimantan submitted a request to the Ministry of Forestry to waive the designation of forest for 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of the former MRP to plant crops, adding rice and sugar cane.be a swamp, according to Sapta Ananda Proklamasi, researcher at Greenpeace Indonesia.
It is transparent if this domain is included in the forestry domain that the Ministry of Forestry now says it is abandoning for the national agricultural project.If so, however, much is a habitat for the critically endangered Borneo orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), a species that are already under pressure from the expansion of oil palm plantations and mining concessions, Sapta said.
One of the main considerations of critics of the revived rice plan is that it will revive what the MRP does a quarter of a century ago: a large soil drainage that makes peat highly flammable and a primary source of Indonesian carbon emissions.
Forty-four of the forest and land fires in Indonesia last year, covering 728,000 hectares (1.8 million acres), occurred in peatlands, according to the knowledge of environmental NGO Madani.
“If rice fields are established [in peatlands], peat ecophormulae will be adjusted to suit the characteristics of the rice paddies,” said Fadli Ahmad Naufal, Madani’s geographic data formula specialist.”This potentially increases vulnerability to fires.”
Dimas Hartono, director of the Central Kalimantan branch of the Indonesian Environmental Forum (Walhi), said it was too difficult to relaunch the MRP at the same site.
“The citizens of Central Kalimantan have long suffered ecological mistakes [forest fires] every year due to the ambitious allocation policy in the past,” he said.
Karliansyah, general director of peatland coverage and recovery rate at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said his workplace had devised a strategy for peat ecosystems at the former MRP site to ensure sustainable food park progression.water management, rehabilitation of degraded peatlands and improvement of the well-being of local populations.
“The recovery of the peat ecosystem at the old MRP site will be essential for the sustainable progress of national food security,” Karliansyah said.
The ministry says that only about 2.5% of the 1.47 million hectares (3.63 million acres) of peatlands located at the former MRP site can be seriously degraded and want to be rehabilitated immediately.
Basuki, of the PPI, stated that the creation of the food farm at the former MRP site would help mitigate forest chimneys and argued that beyond chimneys they would possibly have spread uncontrollably because the domain was deserted and largely unguarded.making sure of a constant presence on the ground, the chimney threat will diminish, he said.
Areas where out-of-control burning has been damaged in the afterlife “have no owners,” Basuki said.”Then, if we effectively identify the rice fields, there will be no giant fires.There will be no mist.”
He said the food parks program was a beneficial solution to all recurrent chimney disorders and crop shortages in Indonesia.
“Why do we want to create a food field?[Because] there’s no other way,” he said. MRP Site]? Whatever the cost, it will have to be properly controlled and controlled.»
Musdhalifah said it’s time for an agricultural country like Indonesia to have its own food park, adding that the government is confident that it will be able to sustainably manage wetlands and peatlands, citing neighboring Malaysia as an example.
“There are many [successful] examples in other countries,” he said. In Sarawak [in Borneo, Malaysia], they also have peat baths and can use them optimally.But they criticize me and ask me why we plant rice.In Malaysia, they use [peatlands] to plant oil palm. In fact, our main crop is rice and, therefore, for our pilot project, we will plant rice.
Dwi, from the PPI, said that for Indonesia to avoid the same pitfalls as previous agri-food park projects, 4 facets must be taken into account: the first is to prioritize spaces where the peat layer is less than a metre deep.providing good enough infrastructure, adding irrigation systems.Thirdly, planting suitable crops and fourthly, doing some social justice.
“Who owns this land [which will be used]?”Dwi said, “Are there indigenous conflicts [on earth]?”
Arie Rompas, a forestry activist from Greenpeace Indonesia, suggested that the government not rush the allocation and respect the rights of other people in Central Kalimantan.
“The government will have to respect the deep ties that other Central Kalimantan people have with their lands and come up with opportunities that do not involve the exploitation of peatlands,” he said. “First, there will have to be a public consultation procedure with the highest in the forefront having an effect on development.”
Rukka Sombolinggi, general secretary of the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN), said the government could solve the challenge of food security by allocating more agricultural land to villagers than companies to manage.
“They say we want 300,000 hectares for the national food sector,” he says.”There are 75,000 villages [in Indonesia]. If the village manages four hectares of agricultural land, then [our] demand for food will be met.”
Banner symbol: The Microsoft Zoom Earth satellite symbol shows a burned swamp segment in the central Kalimantan region where rice allocation is planned.
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