Fires across Indonesia
Fires blazing in Kalimantan and Sumatra in Indonesia have created epic palls of smoke visible to the Himawari-8 satellite between October 14 and 22 of 2015. The fires, mostly to clear land for agricultural purposes, have been releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day, on average, than the entire economy of the United States.
"They are thieves that have come to rob our island."
This story in Time Magazine online and headlined Land Wars: Indonesia Unrest Shows Risks of Resource-Led Growth, by Jason Tedjasukmana back in 2012, is about the resistance by villagers to local and multinational resource-based companies operating in communities who feel their rights are routinely obscured by murky regulations, poor governance and heavy-handed security forces. The story begins:
On a scorching day in January, the only thing hotter than the afternoon sun is the fiery shouts emanating from the local mosque. Hundreds of villagers have gathered there to speak with the mediation team sent by the government to help settle a dispute between Riau Andalan Pulp & Paper (RAPP) and villagers who want to force the company off Pulau Padang, a small island near Sumatra. "We reject RAPP," a villager screams out to the crowd. "They are thieves that have come to rob our island."
The tensions building in this corner of Riau province are not unusual in today's Indonesia, a country abundant in timber, coal and palm oil. With strong global commodity prices, the drive to exploit these natural resources is greater than ever. But, in many communities, so are calls for resistance. From Pulau Padang and Mesuji in the west to Bima and Timika in eastern Indonesia, anger has often erupted over local and multinational resource-based companies operating in communities who feel their rights are routinely obscured by murky regulations, poor governance and heavy-handed security forces.
At the same time companies like RAPP point to the arduous process of obtaining licenses and how this particular concession took five years to negotiate. With so little clarity and so much overlapping authority, it is little wonder that conflict persists. RAPP, a member of Asia Pacific Resources International Ltd. (APRIL), one of the largest pulp-and-paper producers in the world, was granted a concession of some 41,000 of the island's 110,000 hectares. While the heads of 11 of the island's 14 villages signed an agreement in support of RAPP last year, locals from the three villages against the concession say the company threatens not only their livelihoods as rubber and sago farmers but also the existence of the island itself. "We have worked in and lived off the forests for generations and done fine without RAPP," explains Tame Herman, a member of the Akit tribe who personally opposes the concession although his village, Teluk Belitung, is said to be in favor. "We don't want them or need them, and we are not afraid to die for our land."
The Indonesian pulp industry is dominated by APRIL and Asia Pulp & Paper, which control 75% of pulp capacity in the country, according to the Center for International Forestry Research's 2008 report on Indonesia's pulp industry. Demand has been increasing dramatically every year and is up 700% since 1990. "Forest loss has been particularly heavy in Riau, which has lost 65% of forest cover in 25 years from pulp, oil palm and other drivers," states the report. "Since late 1980s, Indonesia's pulp industry has been responsible for natural forest clearing of at least 1.7 million hectares."
In 2015 the Guardian identified a similar situation in the development of Palm oil plantations across Indonesia.
Palm oil companies exploit Indonesia's people - and its corrupt political machine
Efforts to prevent deforestation, protect indigenous communities and help smallholders overlook the rich vein of criminality in the plantation sector
Throughout Indonesia, a vast archipelago draped across the equator, a human rights crisis simmers.
Over the past two decades, indigenous communities have seen the government hand their land over to private companies. These companies are largely producing one of two commodities: fast-growing timber species to supply the pulp and paper industry or palm oil, a remarkably versatile edible oil.
Despite President Joko Widodo’s promise to crack down on deforestation from palm oil expansion last year, the launch of the mandatory Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil certification scheme and a raft of voluntary commitments by palm oil companies, destruction and exploitation remain the norm.
The government estimates that thousands of communities are involved in active or latent conflicts with companies, the state and each other as a result. Individuals from Sumatra in the west to Papua in the east have become labourers on their own land. This is also an environmental disaster, as plantations for these crops surge into forests and carbon-rich peatlands.Private sector pressure
Pressure from NGOs on the companies complicit in this crisis has led to a cascade of so-called zero-deforestation commitments in recent years. The world’s biggest palm oil growers, traders and buyers are now on board with what, on paper, suggests a new dawn.
The challenges of implementing these pledges, which also include commitments to respecting rights, are manifold and complex. This much has been made abundantly clear in recent weeks. Last month, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) found that Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), the biggest palm oil producer in Indonesia, has failed to respect the free, prior and informed consent of indigenous communities.GAR was among the first of the major palm oil firms to commit to an ambitious and wide-reaching voluntary policy to protect forests and rights. The RSPO has now instructed GAR to cease expanding until this is resolved.
The Forest Trust (TFT) is a non-profit which has been working with PT SMART – GAR’s plantation company – since 2011 to help the Singapore-based business implement its policy. TFT has now suspended PT SMART’s membership, although the non-profit is still working with GAR’s trading arm.
These developments are a stark reminder of the challenges of transforming an industry and, above all, the dangers of reliance on voluntary commitments.
Indeed, the failure of the Indonesian government to reciprocate progressive reforms within the industry is allowing other smaller, more opaque firms to step in and start working in ecologically sensitive areas that many larger firms avoid. While GAR’s failings undoubtedly represent a step backwards, it is arguably the actions of the sections of the industry not subject to the same reputational pressure that now pose the gravest threat to Indonesia’s forests.
Several such companies were featured in the report Permitting Crime, released by the Environmental Investigation Agency in December 2014. This documents how these opaque companies continued to illegally destroy large swaths of biodiverse, carbon-rich forests against the wishes of local communities. The evidence indicates there are more than enough of these companies to undermine the impact of the zero-deforestation commitments.
These firms are, ultimately, making use of a political and economic environment in Indonesia that remains conducive to deforestation and rights abuses.
The roots of the crisis
To understand the crisis it is valuable to look back to 1967. Then, in order to facilitate access for principally foreign firms to Indonesia’s vast natural resources and thereby generate hard currency, the New Order regime passed a law that designated 70% of the country as state forest.
In one fell swoop this vast area, home to millions, came under the direct control of the government. Under this regime, the government has since been leasing indigenous lands to private companies to clear forest and cultivate palm oil.
The situation grew worse in the years after the fall of the regime in the late 1990s. A programme of decentralisation of power created hundreds of fiefdoms governed by locally elected officials. These bupatis, or regents require cash to fund notoriously costly elections. They exercise almost complete control over land allocation and use it to facilitate access for plantation companies, irrespective of environmental criteria or the desires of their electorate. They also routinely come under investigation by the state’s corruption watchdogs.
In-depth research into the way the government allocates land has revealed a rich vein of criminality in the plantation sector. While legal mechanisms do exist to limit and mitigate the impacts of concessions, they are routinely ignored by companies in an effort to maximise their landholdings. They are able to do so only because of the complicity of government officials in the first instance, and because enforcement apparatus in the country refuses to bring the law to bear.
Addressing the political economy
This is, then, a problem exploited by the private sector rather than created by it. By extension, the private sector cannot solve it alone.
The zero-deforestation firms would be the first to admit they need regulatory support for their new values to make them sustainable. For several years, companies setting aside ecologically sensitive areas within their landbanks have seen them reallocated by local governments to other companies. Without a legal basis for these principles, they cannot be effectively spread across the industry, and even into others.
It is therefore a positive step that the zero-deforestation firms have begun actively engaging the Indonesian government to find ways to embed their progressive principles in law. Several major palm oil growers have now signed the Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge, which commits them to lobbying for improved policies.
However, to institute lasting reform, the government must also confront some difficult questions about the corruption involved in land allocation and the absence of law enforcement. There is a risk that improved policies will be fundamentally undermined by the brazen criminality of bupatis and the opaque firms in league with them.
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Even more pressing than jailing corrupt officials, Indonesia needs to institute radical transparency in the process of land allocation. We need the chance to identify and preempt damaging and criminal developments before they occur, to give communities the opportunity to make informed economic decisions for themselves.
The palm oil frontier is pushing into increasingly remote areas of southeast Asia and West Africa. In these places, the forests are rich and forest-dependent communities are less able to adapt to a life of plantation work.
The need to end the unaccountable and unconstitutional theft of customary forests has never been greater.
Four months later, in the same newspaper, George Monbiot was writing about Indonesia burning.
Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?
This is an excerpt from this Opinion piece written by George Monbiot and published in the Guardian on 30 October 2015:
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
The president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the west, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.
They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still treated as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.
6 years after moratorium, satellite data shows Indonesia's tropical forests remain threatened.
Six years after Indonesia passed a forest moratorium aimed at slowing unsustainable agricultural expansion into primary forests and peatlands, tree cover loss remains high, according to the latest satellite data from the University of Maryland and Google, available now on Global Forest Watch. The 2015 tree cover loss data from the Global Land Analysis & Discovery (GLAD) lab at the University of Maryland — the most recent annual global data available — show tree cover loss in Indonesia remained high between 2001 and 2015, though that doesn’t fully reflect the devastation of forest and peatland fires in late 2015. Tree cover loss refers to the loss of any trees, regardless of cause or type, from tropical rainforest to tree plantation. For this analysis, we calculated tree cover loss within Indonesia’s primary forest data, which shows intact and degraded natural forests of five hectares (12 acres) or more. Forest cover loss in Indonesia peaked in 2012 at 928,000 hectares (2.3 million acres), dropped significantly in 2013 and then increased in 2014 and 2015 to 796,500 hectares (2 million acres) and 735,000 hectares (2.8 million acres), respectively. Here’s a look at the trend between 2001 and 2015.
- Kalimantan: Almost half the national forest loss in 2015 occured in Kalimantan, reaching 323,000 hectares (798,000 acres). Massive expansion of oil palm plantations into forests starting in 2005 may well have been a factor.
- Sumatra: Forest loss in Sumatra dropped significantly from 2014 to 2015, but that because there are no more accessible primary forests to cut. The map below shows that the remaining 321,000 hectares of primary forest in Sumatra are located along steep slope, mountainous forest regions along Bukit Barisan that are difficult to reach.
- Papua: Forest conservation efforts should be focused in Papua Island, home to about a third of Indonesia’s remaining rainforests, which provide habitats for biodiversity and livelihoods for villagers. Forest cover loss increased in Papua and West Papua provinces; 2015 showed the highest forest cover loss since 2001.
Deforestation has been largely driven by industrial agriculture, plantations and logging often within primary forests and carbon-rich peatlands. Data from Greenpeace Indonesia show that 48 palm oil companies have permits in Papua and West Papua provinces, ranging from 25,000 to 45,000 hectares (62,000 to 111,000 acres) in size. The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry found that permits within forests in Papua have been granted since 2011 and some permits that mandate saving 20 percent of the area for local communities have been traded to businesses. Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar reiterated that the government would prioritize the moratorium in these two provinces. Besides the damaging environmental impact of forest cover loss, forest encroachment also contributed to social conflicts, including violation of local community rights and land disputes.
How Effective Is the Moratorium?
Forest loss within moratorium areas continued to increase in 2015 in all areas except Sumatra, suggesting that the moratorium had scant effect on forest protection. Kalimantan recorded the highest forest loss within the moratorium area in 2015 (69,000 hectares or 170,000 acres), followed by Sumatra (39,000 hectares, or 96,000 acres) and Papua (25,000 hectares, or 62,000 acres). This could be because the moratorium is issued in the form of Presidential Instruction, which does not entail legal consequences for the perpetrators. With a decentralized political system in Indonesia, sub-national leaders can also issue local policies that may undermine the moratorium altogether.
Moving forward: Systematic and Structural Work
Despite Indonesia’s forest management commitments—such as moratorium policy, climate commitment laid out in the Nationally Determined Contribution and government regulations to protect peatland—much work needs to be done. Deforestation and land use change account for 47.7 percent of Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling climate change in Indonesia—the world’s six-largest greenhouse gas emitter—will require a systematic and structural effort to transform land management. Weak forest and land governance in Indonesia cause problems from overexploitation of natural resources to social conflicts. One ways to improve governance is through President Joko Widodo’s One Map Policy, which calls for a synchronization of thematic maps from various sectors to include all key local stakeholders. To produce more effective policies to fight deforestation, further analysis needs to include forest timber harvesting data that can help track legal and illegal logging. To perform such analysis, the government should share logging concessions data with the public. On the law enforcement side, agencies need to strengthen monitoring to track the illegal logging and timber trade, while using available technologies to improve investigations of illegal logging. Implementing an effective and accountable Timber Legality Assurance System (SVLK) could help Indonesia intensify its fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated illegal logging and timber trade. Finally, public and civil society organizations can all be an informed citizens and voice concerns over increasing forest loss. Platforms like Global Forest Watch can monitor forest change in near real-time and advocate against forest encroachment. It is time to escalate efforts to protect tropical forests to decrease emissions and support the communities that depend on these landscapes for food, water, energy and health.
This World Resources Institute blog cites GFW
In the midst of the second-worst year for tropical tree cover loss in 2017, Indonesia saw an encouraging sign: a 60 percent drop in tree cover loss in primary forests compared with 2016. That's the difference in carbon dioxide emissions from primary forest loss equivalent to 0.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide, or about the same emissions released from burning over 199 billion pounds of coal.
Our analysis suggests that in recent years, forest loss inside oil palm and fiber plantations concessions decreased, but mostly because expansion occurred outside concessions. Determining where deforestation took place outside the concessions area is beyond the scope of this blogpost, but several policies should be strengthened to prevent forest loss especially outside the legal concessions.
Enforcing moratorium and expanding the scope of the moratorium to include secondary natural forests that are still high in carbon stocks and biodiversity would be critical not only to prevent forest loss outside concessions but also to prevent substantial carbon emissions from being released.
Given the significant forest loss outside the concessions that is presumably driven by unregistered palm oil operations, updated data is essential, particularly on smallholder plantation concessions whose data is limited. Making the data more comprehensive is the first critical step to understand where forest loss took place and to ensure better monitoring of forest loss outside concessions. Efforts to map smallholder palm oil plantations have been made by national and local government, private sectors and other organizations. However, those efforts are scattered, so the government should take the lead in synchronizing the efforts to achieve more meaningful impact.
Update 2018
Fires and haze return to Indonesia as peat protection bid falls short
Indonesia for Sale
In October 2017 Mongabay launched an in-depth series on corruption, palm oil and rainforests, that is called "Indonesia for Sale".
- The investigative series Indonesia for Sale, launching this week, shines new light on the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land rights crisis.
- In-depth stories, to be released over the coming months, will expose the role of collusion between palm oil firms and politicians in subverting Indonesia’s democracy. They will be published in English and Indonesian.
- The series is the product of nine months’ reporting across the country, interviewing fixers, middlemen, lawyers and companies involved in land deals, and those most affected by them.
- Indonesia for Sale is a collaboration between Mongabay and The Gecko Project, an investigative reporting initiative established by UK-based nonprofit Earthsight.
The Gecko Project is an investigative journalism initiative established to shine a light on the corruption driving land grabs and the destruction of tropical rainforests. It seeks to create and maintain a sense of urgency over the role of large land deals, predominantly for food production, in some of the most pressing global challenges: climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, food security, and the rights of indigenous peoples and other rural communities. We aim to achieve this through the production and promotion of in-depth, high-quality and accessible journalism. The Gecko Project was established at Earthsight in 2017.
Update
The Gecko Project became an independent organisation in 2019. Here is one of their investigations.
The making of a palm oil fiefdom
A Forbes magazine spread on Indonesia’s “top emerging business leaders”. Arif Rachmat is far left.
This report ends with a review of the way it is:
One of Arif’s subordinates told us in an email that Triputra adheres to regulations requiring companies to provide smallholdings equivalent to a fifth of their plantations. This is not true in Seruyan, and there is evidence that the social unrest caused by the company spreads across its land bank, into other districts in Kalimantan.
Today, oil palm covers more than a fifth of Seruyan’s land. Ninety-six percent of it is owned by the super-rich, including the Kuok, Rachmat, Tjajadi and Widjaja families. Profits flow out to the capitals of Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Only a fraction of the taxes collected by the state find their way back to Seruyan.
“We’ve been waiting for seven years. This is our last hope. God willing, the company can help us.”
The oil palm is concentrated in the district’s southern half, where most of its people also live. Villagers’ access to land is tightly constrained by the mega-plantations. Lake Sembuluh and its waterfront villages are almost fully encircled. Its southern banks are claimed entirely by Triputra, whose estates also extend down along the Seruyan River, hemming in the villages dotted along it.
In a written response to questions for this article, Wilmar told us it was trying to provide smallholdings in Seruyan and had succeeded in some areas. But it also said its efforts had stalled because there was no land left. This is what has become of a vision of private sector-led development that would somehow benefit the poor: no land for the farmers, because the billionaires own it all.
Sudarsono, the great hope for Seruyan, has earned the quiet disappointment of those who fought for his victory in the polls, and who remain excluded from the palm oil riches. But he has succeeded in promoting Seruyan as a pilot for a new idea floated in the world of corporate sustainability, branded “jurisdictional certification”.
After two decades of land rights abuses and plantation-driven deforestation, the proposal is that all palm oil from the district will be declared “sustainable”. Seruyan would serve, as one official put it, as “a model for other districts, not only in Central Kalimantan but also in Indonesia, for sustainable palm oil development.” Consumer goods giant Unilever, the world’s largest palm oil user, would preferentially source from the district.
Sudarsono told a gathering of palm oil firms and NGOs, in 2015, that when companies sourced from Seruyan, they could be certain they were buying palm oil produced “without causing deforestation”. He added: “They will also know that there was no burning when clearing land or seizures of indigenous lands.”
The programme includes some progressive ideas, such as ensuring smallholders have a route to market, and resolving land conflicts. But for now, it is mostly carrot, and very little stick. Seruyan’s palm oil firms are offered a path to redemption but do not have to face the consequences of previous wrongdoing.
The idea reflects a desire among corporate executives and some politicians to draw a line under the past and treat the present as day zero in a new era of sustainability. The sins of yesterday are forgotten, and plantations on land that was forest a few years ago can be deemed “sustainable”. In response to our questions, for example, Wilmar spokesperson Iris Chan said the company should be judged on what it does today. “We do not believe that raising issues from more than ten years ago is meaningful”, she wrote.
The problem for the people of Seruyan is that they are stuck with the legacy of decisions made a decade ago. But the notion that actions taken then are inviolable is not shared by the KPK. The anti-graft agency is pioneering a more proactive approach to corruption in the sector, examining the legal compliance of plantation companies across the country. A similar focus on the mining sector, which began in 2014, yielded the cancellation of hundreds of licenses.
The potential for such an approach is limited in Seruyan, since the land has long since been cleared and planted. But large numbers of latent and as-yet unexploited licenses hang over forests and indigenous lands throughout Indonesia, especially on the islands east of Borneo, where the industry is quickly expanding. Little scrutiny has been applied to the circumstances in which they were issued. A growing body of evidence — including forthcoming stories in the Indonesia for Sale series — suggests that a seething mass of collusion lies beneath most of these paper permits. In those cases, revocation could prevent the orgy of destruction and exploitation from occurring in the first place.
But while it might provide a respite for Indonesia’s forests, solely revoking existing licenses will not solve the problem. The lesson of Seruyan, and the model it represents for other districts, is how much damage can occur when government officials are allowed to act in a vacuum of accountability and scrutiny. The shadow system that allowed Darwan Ali to flourish remains unchanged. There has been little effort to break the link between money and politics. It is this link that allows bupatis to bankroll elections and inflict harm on the people they are elected to serve, in favour of lining their own pockets.
The shadow system that allowed Darwan Ali to flourish remains unchanged.The game goes on in frontier districts across the archipelago. There are indications that the lessons of Seruyan are already being applied elsewhere, though not for good. Khaeruddin Hamdat, Darwan’s right-hand man, has reappeared in Donggala, a heavily forested district on the island of Sulawesi, just east of Borneo, where conflicts between people and oil palm companies are just now emerging. Facebook photos show him poring over a concession map and dining with the bupati, who will stand for re-election next year.
In June 2018, more than 100 districts will return to the polls to elect new, or perhaps incumbent, bupatis. Among them is Seruyan. Darwan’s daughter, Iswanti, will be the next of the family to pitch for its top position. She registered as a candidate in May.
“As a ‘daughter of the soil’,” she told reporters, “I feel called to serve and develop Seruyan.”
Update
Latest video from The Gecko Project
Paradise lost? Nature and Society
What kind of image is capable of representing the kinds of relationship that are at work between nature and society. The Garden of Earthly Delights is the modern title given to a triptych oil painting on oak panel painted by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, between 1490 and 1510. Knowing what this extraordinary picture represents remains elusive, but it is presented here as an image to express two realities simultaneously. In its central panel we can find Version 1.0, that is human beings as a part of a nature before "the fall", and when paradise was a garden, a garden of Eden. Version 2.0 is the uneasy, prickly interface between humans and nature as separated by the terms we are using here: Nature and Society.
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel asks the question:
How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it?
Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated the Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analysing today’s planetary emergencies.
The "separation" of people from nature is part of the ecology of capitalism, as they describe, and what we might call, the modern, contemporary and continuing "fall of man", or Paradise Lost. This is what they say:
The notion that individuals are part of collective units greater than themselves isn't new - humans have long given names to and established boundaries around social groups: being part of the polis, the city, the Middle Kingdom, Christendom, the chosen people, and so on. But modern society has a historically unique antonym: nature. On the other side of "society" are not other humans but the wild. Before nation came society. Before society could be defended it had to be invented. And it was invented through the policing of a strict boundary with nature.Where European capitalism thrived was in its capacity to turn nature into something productive and to transform that productivity into wealth. This capacity depended on a peculiar blend of force, commerce, and technology, but also something else - an intellectual revolution underwritten by a new idea: Nature as the opposite of Society*.
*Note:
But where are the people?
The word "paradise" entered English from the French paradis, inherited from the Latin paradisus, from Greek parádeisos (παράδεισος), from an Old Iranian form, from Proto-Iranian*parādaiĵah- "walled enclosure", whence Old Persian 𐎱𐎼𐎭𐎹𐎭𐎠𐎶 p-r-d-y-d-a-m /paridaidam/, Avestan 𐬞𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌⸱𐬛𐬀𐬉𐬰𐬀 pairi-daêza-. By the 6th/5th century BCE, the Old Iranian word had been borrowed into Assyrian pardesu "domain". It subsequently came to indicate the expansive walled gardens of the First Persian Empire, and was subsequently borrowed into Greek as παράδεισος parádeisos "park for animals" in the Anabasis of the early 4th century BCE Athenian Xenophon, Aramaic as pardaysa "royal park".
The primary image we find on the Wikipedia article on Paradise is a painting of Paradise by Jan Brueghel. This is an image of a forest environment, with a river flowing through it, inhabited by exotic animals, especially birds, and including a lion, cohabiting peacefully with more familiar, local fauna.
But no human beings!
Nature as the opposite of Society!
This idea gripped far more than philosophical minds. It became the common sense of conquest and plunder as a way of life. Nature's bloody contradictions found their greatest expression on capitalism's frontiers, forged in violence and rebellion.
We take for granted that some parts of the world are social and others are natural. Racialized violence, mass unemployment and incarceration, consumer cultures - these are the stuff of social problems and social injustice. Climate, biodiversity, resource depletion - these are the stuff of natural problems, of ecological crisis. But it's not just that we think about the world in this way. It's also that we make it so, acting as if the Social and the Natural were autonomous domains, as if relations of human power were somehow untouched by the web of life.
Real abstractions
Moore and Patel then explain how in their book they use these words - Nature and Society:
. . . in a way that's different from their everyday use. We're capitalizing them as a sign that they are concepts that don't merely describe the world but help us organize it and ourselves. Scholars call concepts like these "real abstractions." These abstractions make statements about ontology - What is? - and about epistemology - How do we know what is? Real abstractions both describe the world and make it. That's why real abstractions are often invisible, and why we use ideas like world-ecology to challenge our readers into seeing Nature and Society as hidden forms of violence. These are undetonated words. Real abstractions aren't innocent; they reflect the interests of the powerful and license them to organize the world.
Q. How did Indonesia get to this state of affairs?
A. Colonialism? Imperialism? Independence? Capitalism? Globalisation?
As an ex-colonial state, Indonesia has frontiers that echo the territorial imprint of the old colonial Dutch Empire.
This detail of Dutch imperial imagery by Johan Braakensiek representing the Dutch East Indies, 1916. The caption says: "The most precious jewel of the Netherlands", alluding to Multatuli's designation "the emerald belt" for the Dutch East Indies.
The author, whose pen name Multatuli means "I have suffered much" (or more literally: "I have borne much"), refers both to himself, the ex-colonial administrator Eduard Douwes Dekker, and to the victims of the injustices he saw. Determined to expose the scandals he had witnessed during his years in the Dutch East Indies, Douwes Dekker began to write newspaper articles and pamphlets. Little notice was taken of these early publications until, in 1860, he published his satirical anticolonialist novel Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, which played a key role in shaping and modifying Dutch colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the novel, the protagonist, Max Havelaar, tries to battle against a corrupt government system in Java, a Dutch colony.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial control of the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) had passed from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to the Dutch government due to the economic failure of the VOC. In order to increase revenue, the Dutch colonial government implemented a series of policies termed the Cultivation System, which mandated Indonesian farmers to grow a quota of commercial crops such as sugar and coffee, instead of growing staple foods such as rice. At the same time, the colonial government also implemented a tax collection system in which the collecting agents were paid by commission. The combination of these two strategies caused widespread abuse of colonial power, especially on the islands of Java and Sumatra, resulting in abject poverty and widespread starvation of the farmers. The colony was governed with a minimum of soldiers and Government officials. The former rulers maintained their absolute power and control over the natives; a quite common strategy used by many colonizing countries. In addition, the Dutch state earned a fortune with the sale of opium to the natives. This was called the "opium-regime".
Multatuli wrote Max Havelaar in protest against these colonial policies, but another goal was to seek rehabilitation for his resignation from governmental service. Despite its terse writing style, it raised the awareness of Europeans living in Europe at the time that the wealth that they enjoyed was the result of suffering in other parts of the world. This awareness eventually formed the motivation for the new Ethical Policy by which the Dutch colonial government attempted to "repay" their debt to their colonial subjects by providing education to some classes of natives, generally members of the elite loyal to the colonial government.
Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer argued that by triggering these educational reforms, Max Havelaar was in turn responsible for the nationalist movement that ended Dutch colonialism in Indonesia after 1945, and which was instrumental in the call for decolonization in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Thus, according to Pramoedya, Max Havelaar is "the book that killed colonialism".
In the last chapter the author announces that he will translate the book "into the few languages I know, and into the many languages I can learn." In fact, Max Havelaar has been translated into thirty-four languages. It was first translated into English in 1868.
In Indonesia, the novel was cited as an inspiration by Sukarno and other early nationalist leaders, such as the author's Eurasian descendant Ernest Douwes Dekker, who had read it in its original Dutch. It was not translated into Indonesian until 1972.
In the novel, the story of Max Havelaar, a Dutch colonial administrator, is told by two diametrically opposed characters: the hypocritical coffee merchant Droogstoppel, who intends to use Havelaar's manuscripts to write about the coffee trade, and the romantic German apprentice Stern, who takes over when Droogstoppel loses interest in the story. The opening chapter of the book nicely sets the tone of the satirical nature of what is to follow, with Droogstoppel articulating his pompous and mercenary world-view at length. At the very end of the novel Multatuli himself takes the pen and the book culminates in a denunciation of Dutch colonial policies and a plea to the king of the Netherlands to intervene on behalf of his Indonesian subjects.
The attitudes of the Dutch colonialists towards the people of Java, and beyond, helped shape the political economy of modern Indonesia, and has a history that is interwoven with the emergence of capitalism as a global dominating force.
It is a history that originates in Europe and goes back as far as feudalism as a system, that was also a "system of cultivation".
In the book quoted above on Nature and Society, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, in the Chapter on Cheap Nature the authors trace the origin of modern emergencies back to;
"the throes of feudal crisis and the birth of early capitalism."
Picking up the thread of their analysis;
. . . but feudalism's systemic weakness wasn't something as simple as soil exhaustion. Feudalism crumbled because of peasants' inability to produce a bigger economic surplus for their seigneurs. Left to their own devices, peasants could have shifted from rye and wheat mono-cultures to a diversified crop mix that included garden produce. In western Europe that could have doubled or tripled food production. But this shift was impossible, given the seigneurs' demand for marketable produce that could readily be turned into cash. In an unsettling parallel with the present day, feudal lords reproduced an agricultural system that privileged short-run gains over meaningful adjustments that would have dented their income but sustained life. It is in this context that cheap nature becomes strategic.
Nature and Society began to take shape in the throes of feudal crisis and the birth of early capitalism.
* Note:The lords' refusal to adjust precipitated an epochal crisis. As we saw in the introduction, agroecological problems enforced by lordly domination fused with climate change and demographic catastrophe* to produce not only death but formidable peasant resistance.
The climate change referred to in the introduction to A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, was the period of climate cooling that occurred around 1315, the Little Ice Age, and catastrophically amplified by the eruption of Mount Tarawera, New Zealand, with a consequence of "massive rains that struck across Europe" that "did not relent until August, when the deluge ended with a cold snap. Harvests had been weak in previous years, but 1315's was disastrous - and so was next year's." The continent did not escape from the Great Famine - as historians call it - until 1322."
*Note (continued)
The Black Death
On top of famine and longer winters, the demographic catastrophe referred to above involved the wiping out of between one-third and one-half of Europe's population as a result of the Black Death:
Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power.
But with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn't just transmit disease - they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasants revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized - they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism's logic of power, production and nature.
Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism's rulers could not tolerate.
Repressive legislation to keep labour cheap, through wage controls or outright reenserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England's Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague's first onslaught (1349-51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.
Cheap Nature continued . . .
The ruling classes tried - and failed - to reenserf peasants in western Europe. But the crisis was about more than class; it was the moment when feudalism's ecology of power, wealth, and nature stopped working. That meant something genuinely epoch making; states, lords, and merchants all had to scramble for novel solutions to restore their wealth.
At the core of these novel solutions was global conquest, not just by guns but also by making new frontiers, at once cultural and geographical. Life and land between money and markets became ways to treat and fix crises across the span of capitalism's ecology. At the heart of this relation with nature lay profit, and its poster child is Christopher Columbus. Columbus, who crops up in every chapter as an early practitioner of each of the strategies of cheap things, came to the Caribbean with not just the conqueror's gaze but an appraisers eye - one sharpened in Portuguese colonial adventures off the shores of North Africa. He launched a colonization of nature as pecuniary as it was peculiar.
The LODE Re:LODE Blog has a section with many references to our post-Columbian world:
"to every place there belongs a story"
Profit didn't come just from trade, however. Nature had to be put to work. An early practical use of the division between Nature and Society appeared in the colonial reinvention of the encomienda. Originally just a claim on land, the ecomienda became a strategy to shift certain humans into the category of Nature so that they might more cheaply work the land. When the Spanish crown was battling for territory in Iberia, encomiendas were a way of managing its spoils. These were temporary land grants given by the king to aristocrats so that they might profit from estates previously occupied by Moors. In the Caribbean, encomiendas were transformed from medieval land grants int modern labor grants, allowing not just access to the land but the de facto enslavement of the Indigenous people who happened to be there. Rights of dominion came to encompass not just territory but also flora and fauna; Indigenous people became the latter. Over time, the encomienda system came to comprise a diversity of labor arrangements, combining legal coercion with wage labor.This meant that the realm of Nature included virtually all peoples of color, most women, and most people with white skin living in semicolonial regions (e.g., Ireland, Poland). This is why in the sixteenth century Castilians referred to Indigenous Andeans as naturales.
The Cultivation System and the stages of capitalism - from a form of colonial feudalism to imperialism and neo-imperialism
The following text is indebted to, and paraphrases, the article: History of Capitalist Development in Indonesia: Part One - Dutch Colonisation, accessed on the In Defence of Marxism website.
The so-called Cultivation System was introduced following the Java War of 1825-1830 that ended in the surrender of the Mataram kingdom, which marked the complete conquest of Java. This system was one based on a regime of forced cultivation, quite different from the earlier transaction system involved with the trade in spices.
The forced Cultivation System involved the colonial government organizing a planned system of cash-crop production for export, leading to the evolution of the plantation industry that has shaped the history of Indonesia. From being the source of raw produce for merchant capitalism, the East Indies was to gradually become the source of raw produce for industrial capitalism, through the forced work of mainly Javanese peasants to raise cash crops for export, rather than the traditional staple crop of rice.
This oppressive system provided the basis for the development and progress of the Netherlands economy, with the main aim to increase, forcibly, the productive capacities of agriculture, primarily on the island of Java, for the benefit of the Dutch treasury. During the whole period of the Cultivation System, from 1840-59, a total of 300 million guilders were raised.
Dutch capitalists were not interested in advancing the productive capacity of agriculture, while the colonial authorities provided very little in the way of capital investment, with virtually no improvement in the techniques of production and manufacture. So the profits that were to come from a change of agricultural production from the staple crop of rice to coffee or sugar, would only come from the productive power of human labour and the land. Javanese peasants were forced to trudge many kilometres from their villages to the coffee cultivation site, and sometimes had to leave their villages for months at a time for coffee service, living in rough temporary shelters near the coffee plantation areas.
In order to establish the sugar plantations, farmers were forced to convert their rice paddies, irrigation channels and dykes, into sugar cane fields. The peasant farmers were required to not only prepare the field, plant and tend the crops, but also to harvest it and transport it to the factory, carrying the produce on their shoulders because of the lack of vehicles and animals, and poor road conditions. And then they were required to work at the factory.
How the features of the modern world were first convened in the manufacture of one of the first capitalist products.
The Cultivation System levied huge amounts of labour from the peasants for the construction of infrastructure deemed necessary for the operation of the Cultivation System, including, but not limited to, road and bridge building for crop transportation, improvement of port facilities, the construction of offices, residences for officials and factories and warehouses for the produce, the building of dams and irrigation channels, and even fortifications.
The extreme exploitation at the heart of this system was unprecedented in the history of the Dutch colonial occupation. Under the Cultivation System peasants were required to perform as much as four or five times the amount of labour customarily demanded before 1830. Most peasants had to work more than 150 days a year on the government designated crop. The crop payments that the peasants received were meagre, whilst they were also being heavily taxed.
The sugar industry was developed by the Dutch colonial government with the help of Dutch private "contractors" and with the agency of priyayi, village heads and the local elites. The rapid profits generated by this industry are enough to point to the rapid development of this industry and how it shaped the patterns of colonial exploitation of the lands and people of the East Indies. Sugar fabriek (factories) became a ubiquitous feature of the rural scene. Around 100 European-owned factories produced in excess of 130,000 tons of sugar annually. The cane was grown by more than 100,000 peasant households working some 12,000 hectares of land.
It was the Cultivation System that provided the basis for the subsequent so-called Liberal economic period. The Dutch government had injected a massive amount of capital into building cash-crop plantations and its industrial facilities, mainly sugar and coffee, but also to ensure the supply of cheap labour through enforced labour. The Cultivation system was a very profitable closed system, ridden with nepotism among government contractors, private planters and import-export houses, while the Dutch civil servants came to be closely linked through family ties.
Dutch capitalists were at this stage not part of this Java clique, but could see that the potential profits of this business were very tempting and wanted an opportunity to invest. This was the reason behind moves to end the Cultivation System in 1870, rather than because of concerns over the misery that the Indonesian peasants suffered due to this exploitative system. The export values following the end of the Cultivation System period, increased at an even faster rate.
The improvement in export values and productivity was primarily down to improvements in technology permitting speedier transport and more efficient processing. However, the conditions for workers and peasants were not much better in the so-called Liberal period than during the time of the Cultivation system, even if treated relatively more humanely and increasing their productivity due to technology.
With the abolition of the Cultivation System through the passing of the Sugar Act of 1870, the main development of the plantation industry shifted away from government agency to private enterprise and external capital. Private and venture capitalists made their way into the Dutch East Indies’ plantation industry, and by 1925, there were 121 sugar manufacturing enterprises (suikerondernemingen) operating in the Dutch East Indies, and a total of 195 sugar mills (suikerfabrieken) were owned or managed by these businesses.
In 1896, the alliance within the sugar industry was strengthened with the creation of the Algemeene Syndicaat van Suikerfabricanten in Nederlandsch Indie that included almost all sugar manufacturing enterprises in the colony. Evidently therefore, within the sugar plantation industry in the Dutch East Indies, what was happening was the evolution of capitalism from free competition to cartel capitalism. Lenin wrote about this process in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:
"The principal stages in the history of monopolies are the following: 1860-70, the highest stage, the apex of development of free competition; monopoly is in the barely discernible, embryonic stage. After the crisis of 1873, a lengthy period of development of cartels; but they are still the exception. They are not yet durable. They are still a transitory phenomenon. The boom at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-03. Cartels become one of the foundations of the whole of economic life. Capitalism has been transformed into imperialism."Page 22, Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1975.
So, the beginning of the so-called Liberal Period in 1870 saw the culmination of the opportunities for free competition in the plantation industry, as private capital rushed in after the abolition of the Cultivation System.
By the end of the 19th century, most of the sugar enterprises had aggregated into one trust where it; "comes to an agreement on the terms of sale, dates of payment, etc. They divide the markets amongst themselves. They fix the quantity of goods to be produced. They fix prices. They divide the profits among the various enterprises, etc."
Most of the enterprises operating in the East Indies were organized as joint-stock companies, where the majority were affiliated with a unique financial institution called the cultuurbanken, finance capital set up to provide capital investment in the plantation industry in the Dutch East Indies. The remarkable expansion of Java's sugar industry beginning at the end of the nineteenth century coincided with the development of a financial market dominated by a few cultuurbanken and the creation of a management system that integrated sugar cane cultivation and processing. The predominance of financial capital is the general characteristic of capitalism at this particular stage, where:
"the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions."Page 56, Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1975.
While the oil and rubber industries were making inroads into islands outside Java in the early 1870s, the expansion of Dutch control over the Outer islands coincided with the interest of the private plantations cultivating crops of tobacco, rubber, tea, coffee and coconut in parts of Borneo, Sulawesi, and South Sumatra. However, the major site for plantation activity outside of Java was the East Coast of Sumatra, which was transformed from being an area of almost endless primary rainforest in the 1860s to one of the world’s major estate regions in the 1920s.
Up until the 1870s, 80 to 90% of the total export value from the Dutch East Indies went to the Netherlands. This was the result of the Cultivation System a system designed by the Dutch government to expand Javanese export production, reoriented exclusively in the economic interests of the Netherlands. The control of both production and export had been under strict government control, so with the end of the Cultivation system the opportunities were opened up to a new generation of main actors in developing the plantation industry, shifting more and more to private enterprise and entrepreneurs. An accompanying tariff liberalization, resulted in the export share to the Netherlands dropping markedly, while intra-Asian exports rose. By the beginning of the 20th century, the export share to the Netherlands had dropped to 30% while in the same period the export share to Asia, mainly to Singapore, followed by China/Hong Kong, India, and Japan, had increased from 13% in the early 1870s to 47% by 1908. As an entry-port for free trade, Singapore trans-shipped most of the Dutch East Indies exports landing on its dock to final destinations elsewhere, but mainly to the USA.
The rapid development of a plantation industrial model coincided with the advancement of the colonial hegemony over the Southeast Asian region by the European powers, the British in Malaya and Burma, the French in Indochina, the United States in the Philippines, and the Dutch in Indonesia.
Improvements in transportation and communication between Southeast Asia and Europe also contributed to this development, particularly the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the laying of submarine cables for telegraphic telecommunication between Europe and Asia in the 1860s and 1870s.
Southeast Asia’s modern colonial economy achieved unprecedented growth between the 1870s through to the 1920s, coinciding with the period of a capitalist boom, consolidating the plantation industry in the so-called Insular Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. This would have not been possible without the existence of the rice producing regions in Mainland Southeast Asia, including the Mekong in French Indochina, the Chao Phraya in Thailand, and the Ayeyardwady in British Burma. The provision of a rice staple to Insular Southeast Asia where rice was insufficient due to the encroaching plantation and increasing population, was crucial.
Disturbed by the knowledge of what was actually happening to the subjects of the Dutch empire in the East Indies, the conscience of Dutch bourgeoisie was prompted to act in the face of the pauperization of the population due to Dutch colonial exploitation. They consequently argued for an ethical policy, but underlying this was something basic. In the end the ethical policy was an expression of an economic need, that was veiled by the apparent benevolence of the Dutch middle classes.
The opportunity to ruthlessly exploit and appropriate the natural resources of Indonesia for the needs and appetite of a booming capitalism in Europe and the US, included mobilizing sections of the local populations to manage the colony with its ever expanding plantation industry, economy, and governance. More schools were built to train local people to become railway workers, doctors, clerks, teachers, local administrators, etc. This was the beginning of a process of acculturation into the attitudes and practices of modern capitalism and the creation of the conditions for the emergence of an Indonesian intelligentsia and proletariat.
This period was for the European colonial powers marked by the impact World War and the Great Depression, and consequent contraction of both import from and exports to the Netherlands and Britain, and the expansion of exports and imports with the US and Japan, reflecting a weakening of British and Dutch capitalism and the emergence of the US and Japan as major powers.
The export of rubber and petroleum surged during this period and reached their peaks in the mid 1920s, matching the increasing demand for a booming automobile industry in the US. Sugar production also reached a high point in the 1920s, and Java was the third largest producer of sugar cane after Cuba and India.
However, after the boom of rubber and sugar production came the bust, caused by problems of overproduction, eventually resulting in a plunge in the markets of the world rubber and sugar prices.
Following the Great Depression in the United States and Europe, sugar ceased to be the key export commodity in Indonesia and was overtaken by rubber and petroleum.
Rubber remained Indonesia’s key export commodity until the first half of the 1960s. Oil exports were the second export commodity after rubber but its share of total exports remained less than 20 percent, and it would not become prominent as an export commodity until the late 1960s. The shift from sugar to rubber as the country’s key export commodity also signified a shift from Java, as the centre for foreign exchange earnings, to the Outer Islands, firstly Sumatra, and followed by Kalimantan.
The twentieth-century rise of nationalism in most of the colonized world, and in the Dutch East Indies was a binary phenomenon. On the one hand, the imperialist powers created common international markets, at the same time as carving out 'artificial' borders that had never existed as such before. This forcibly created the framework for future nation states. On the other hand, a national identity was created amongst the colonized people through their struggle against the colonial, and foreign, oppressors.
However, what was also present in the framework of the future nation states were the demands and promises of a rapacious capitalist system. In the modern history of Indonesia, despite the attempts of the founders of the state to ameliorate the impacts of neo-colonialism in the developing stages of a dominating global capitalism, what has happened is the political and business elite class has, in effect, continued to develop this capitalist model. Capitalistic enterprises are designed for maximum profit, and for purposes that are very limited in terms of a public or social benefit, and fueled by a system of corruption and greed that disregards any and all possible environmental impact.
That is, if they can get away with it!
There are NO boundaries!
Greenpeace on Tuesday accused banking giant HSBC of helping to arrange billions of dollars in financing for companies whose palm oil operations have been blamed for destroying vast swathes of Indonesian rainforest.
Update
25 June 2018 – After an investigation conducted by Greenpeace International, it has been revealed that Wilmar International (the world's largest palm oil trader) is still linked to forest destruction in the Indonesian province of Papua. The deforestation conducted by Gama (a palm oil business run by senior Wilmar executives) has reached twice the size of Paris. Greenpeace is also calling Wilmar out for breaking the commitment to end deforestation policy signed by Wilmar in December 2013 where they promise to incorporate organic and sustainable ways to collect palm oil.
Global head of Greenpeace on Southeast Asia, Kiki Taufik, argues that "Wilmar must immediately cut off all palm oil suppliers that can’t prove they aren’t destroying rainforests." He also added that "Wilmar has been trading Gama’s oil all over the world, including top brands like P&G, Nestlé and Unilever. Brands cannot let this deception pass unchallenged and have no choice but to suspend all business with Wilmar until it can prove it only trades clean palm oil from responsible producers."
Until now, Wilmar's executives have only denied the accusation labeling them as "false" and are not taking any blame on them.
Until now!
This highly informative article for The New York Times Magazine by Abrahm Lustgarten Nov. 20, 2018 has as its headline:
Palm oil was supposed to help save the planet. Instead it unleashed a catastrophe.
The article reveals how United States policy has been instrumental in triggering a process that has led to this environmental catastrophe in Indonesia, while making it possible for huge profits to be made for businesses involved in shadowy and murky dealings with corrupt politicians and officials.
He ends the article with these two paragraphs:
In perhaps the final turn of the life cycle, Indonesia is now working to become its own largest customer. In 2016, it instituted a 20 percent biofuels mandate for its domestic fuels, and this August, it extended that mandate to cover railways and power generation too. Then it upped the pressure further, simply making it compulsory that Indonesians buy and use biodiesel. Officials offer a simple justification for this push: Under the Paris climate accord, they say, converting Indonesia to renewable fuels is the only way the country can meet its own climate goals.
The central problem, of course, is that the goals of Paris — slowing planetary warming just enough to allow humans time to adapt to excruciating and inevitable changes, including flooding coastlines, stronger hurricanes and perpetual famine and drought — are unlikely to ever be achieved without stopping deforestation. The planet’s forests have the potential to sequester as much as a third of the carbon in the air. Right now deforestation globally contributes 15 percent of the planet’s total emissions, the same as all the cars and trucks and trains across the globe. On paper, biodiesel is a way to make all those modes of transportation produce less carbon. But in the world as it is, that calculation is far more likely to lead to catastrophe.
Members of the Wehea Dayak tribe walking past a palm-oil tanker during an initiation ceremony in East Kalimantan. Credit Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
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