Blog by Dr Tom Swinfield, Conservation Scientist, RSPB Centre for Conservation Science
The high tide mark of oil palm expansion in the tropics is as yet unknown and still some way off it seems. Subsequent waves of deforestation recede to reveal transformed landscapes, riddled with new roads, planted palms emerging from the debris of the forests that had stood there for millions of years and even now struggle to regain their place.
These are the thoughts passing through my head as I got off the plane at Jambi airport in Central Sumatra, en route to Hutan Harapan (Hope Forest in Bahasa Indonesia; aka Harapan). I was on a two week trip to check in with colleagues working to develop agroforestry systems with small-holders who would otherwise establish oil palm plantations. The work is being done by the private company that manages Harapan, PT Restorasi Ekosistem Indonesia (trans. Ecosystem Restoration Indonesia; aka REKI), as part of a Darwin project, which you can read about in detail here.
It’s always great to return to Indonesia. A combination of the smokey air, whizzing mopeds and ubiquitous building work makes it feel an extremely dynamic country and in the five years since I have been working there the two airport terminals I pass through regularly (Jakarta and Jambi) have been completely rebuilt, so they certainly seem to be making a lot of progress. Sadly the same is also true for deforestation, with Indonesia now losing forest faster than any other country. Despite all this change though much was the same as I remembered at Harapan basecamp and it was great to be greeted by the same friendly faces as I arrived.
Restoring productivity in the Harapan rainforest
Harapan is the first Ecosystem Restoration concession in Indonesia, which means that after four decades of selective (and sometimes not so selective logging) the government has stated an intention to restore it to a state of productivity, both in terms of biodiversity but also commercially. This is a huge challenge. Logged natural forests have few commercial resources and are highly threatened by conversion to agriculture, particularly oil palm. This recent investigative series by Mongabay and The Gecko Project goes into a lot of detail on the reasons why this is happening.
At Harapan the main threat is forest clearance and subsequent claims by small holder farmers. It is extremely challenging to reclaim this land directly through legal action, so zones have been allocated within the concession where the priority is to build strong collaborative relationships with communities. These involve developing management agreements specifying that rubber agroforestry is planted instead of oil palm and forest clearance is ceased; in exchange REKI provides support by way of high quality planting stock. In theory this should set up a win-win situation, mainly through the diverse benefits of agroforestry.
Photo: An area of pristine natural forest within Harapan which is the target for ecosystem restoration: forest that is both highly diverse and also commercially productive, by Tom Swinfield.
Photo: The creeping edge of oil palm. Roads give access to small holders who clear land, hoping to improve their livelihoods by establishing oil palm, by Tom Swinfield.
Agroforestry win-win
In essence agroforestry, is the process of planting trees alongside or within agricultural crops, which has a number of benefits directly to the farmer and generates ecosystem services that are not produced in monoculture (one type of crop) systems. This video by MinuteEarth gives a good explanation; and Darwin project partners, the World Agroforestry Center, summarise the benefits of agroforests as follows, they:
If agroforestry is so great, why is it so rare in commercial farming?
Indeed why? And how do you go about persuading a local farmer, who has seen so much of their local landscape converted to the highly lucrative and demanded oil palm, that they should spend the next 30 years or so tending an rubber agroforest instead?
Photo: Oil palm fruits waiting for collection at the side of the road, by Tom Swinfield.
The answer to the first question is that farmers know that oil palm is easy to cultivate and highly profitable, making it a very safe bet. Access to markets is easy, particularly with oil palm mills springing up all over the place, and working with a single crop enables farmers to specialise with equipment and expertise so they can work quickly, reduce costs and maximising profit. However, monoculture systems are often highly reliant on chemical inputs, they are poor at buffering water, causing both floods and droughts, and lead to soil degradation through erosion and carbon emissions. These so called externalities are borne by society at large and not by the farmer. For example, plants are highly dependent upon nitrate based fertilisers produced by huge quantities of energy from atmospheric nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process. The energy usually comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere and causes global warming. At present this cost to society is not properly accounted for in the price of fertilisers or crops which distorts the decisions that farmers and consumers make.
REKI is addressing the second question through building positive relationships with farmers so that the direct benefits of agroforestry to them are believed and accepted. This is important as these are a little abstract: agroforestry systems buffer against changes in market prices through diversity, so that by selling several products, rather than just one, average household incomes are more stable; and agroforestry systems are, in fact, expected be more productive overall because the different crops, in essence, help each other (e.g. fertiliser applied to a fast growing, cash crop will lead to greater growth of timber trees). A small but growing agroforestry team has been set up in the Community Partnerships department, led by my esteemed colleague Munthe. It’s his job to gain the trust of farmers and convince them that agroforestry is the answer. He and his team are trialling four different agroforestry systems of increasing complexity to identify which of these offers the greatest productivity and provision of ecosystem services, without overworking farmers.
Photo: Munthe (REKI) and Mangara (Burung Indonesia) preparing rubber seedlings for planting, by Tom Swinfield.
So we joined Munthe on a two day trip around Harapan to see the progress that has been made in the past few months. There was a very nice atmosphere at Simpang Macan Luar, the first site we visited, where a group of farmers had prepared the land and were planting a simple agroforestry system of rubber and jackfruit under the hot morning sun as we arrived. They had agreed to plant a one hectare demonstration plot with the four different systems exactly as recommended by Munthe’s team and were establishing a further 30 hectares with rubber and fruit trees according to their own design.
We continued on to the communities at Sungai Kelompang, Gelinding, Tanding, Kunangan Jaya and Kapas Tengah. Meeting with the farmers was real fun. I had met several before and they enthusiastically greeted me with “Halo lagi Pak” (hello again mister) and when they could, they generously offered us sweet black teas and coffees. Each had slightly different attitudes towards agroforestry and to our interest in their farms, as foreigners, but my overall feeling was that they were happy for the collaboration with REKI but were sceptical; I suppose rightly so given that this choice of what to plant will influence their livelihoods, possibly for the rest of their lives.
Photo: An area at Kunangan Jaya in the North of Harapan, which had been cleared and planned for oil palm development. Through the hard work of the Community Partnership team the area is now planned for agroforestry development instead, by Tom Swinfield.
It is clearly difficult to influence farmers. Even though it may be easy enough to persuade them to plant rubber in place of oil palm, there is still a great deal of reluctance to abandon industry standards on tree spacings and break from monoculture to polyculture (many different types of crop). Despite most saying they had experience implementing agroforestry, their approach seemed to be rather opportunistic: planting fruit trees in spaces between the oil palm or rubber rather than implementing a system carefully designed to optimise yields.
Planning for a more sustainable future
After our trip, we spent a day debriefing: assessing the progress that has been made and what still needs to be done. The project targets include substantial areas planted with agroforestry by 2019 and some great progress has been made in terms of pledges of land by communities towards this. Munthe’s team has already made some great relationships with farmers, which is particularly impressive as many had previously been in a state of conflict with REKI. The hope now is that adoption will really take off once the demonstration plots begin to show how productive agroforestry really can be. The bigger challenge is to ensure that wider areas are planted with the systems that provide the biggest benefits to both parties.
As areas are planted REKI will work in partnership with farmers to collect baseline measurements: the costs of establishment and maintenance will be recorded so that profitability can be assessed; plant size will be measured so that growth rates can be tracked; and ecosystem function will be monitored through soil health (chemical composition, infiltration and decomposition) and biodiversity (birds and soil invertebrates). These surveys will be repeated at the end of the project and then periodically thereafter so we can build up much stronger evidence to demonstrate the value of agroforestry. Ultimately the aim of the project is to increase the uptake of agroforestry not just at Harapan but across Indonesia and these findings will be central to the case for why that should be.