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Conservationists v chainsaws: the RSPB’s battle to save an Indonesian rainforest
In 2007 an RSPB-led group bought up a series of logged-out Indonesian forests to bring them back from the brink. But in a country that’s losing trees faster than any other and where farmers are desperate for land, it’s an uphill effort
By Colm O’Molloy
Brad Sanders, an American forestry manager in Jambi province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, stood with members of his Harapan rainforest team, sharpening bamboo poles in anticipation of an attack.
A stout, elderly ex-military officer who worked as a camp security guard asked Sanders’ advice on that morning in October 2012. “What should we do if they come into the camp and try to hurt us? Try to swing their machetes or shoot us, pak [sir]?”
Sanders responded that they should stand behind the line of police who had made the day’s drive from the provincial capital, the people with guns and uniforms. “But pak,” the guard said, “they will be the first to run.”
Indonesia is no stranger to conflict over its shrinking forests. But this fight does not involve the usual players. Harapan, a rainforest the size of greater London whose name means ‘hope’, is majority-owned and managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Founded by a group of Victorian women protesting the use of rare bird feathers in ladies hats, this household name in British conservation now defends endangered habitats across Europe and further afield in both Indonesia and Sierra Leone.
Harapan came about in 2007 after an RSPB-led group decided to buy up a series of logged-out forests. Their mission: to bring Sumatra’s last dry lowland rainforest back from the brink.
Harapan is damaged, but still very much alive. An estimated 30 Sumatran tigers live here. There are only 300 left in the wild. The forest is home to over 260 species of birds, many of them endangered. RSPB hidden cameras, intended to study tigers, have even photographed little-known tribes hunting deep in the jungle.
But in recent years, Harapan has become mired in conflicts with migrant farmers. Satellite data shows that since 2007, Harapan has lost at least four times as much forest as it has replanted with trees. By early 2012, increasingly organised groups were cutting into the forest at a rate of one square mile per month. In 2013, this slowed to a quarter square mile per month, due to enforcement efforts and high rainfall which makes land clearance difficult. The pace increased slightly in 2014, to 0.34 square miles per month.
There is a lot at stake at Harapan. Indonesia, one of the world’s great rainforest nations, is losing trees at a rate faster than any other country. Half its forests disappeared between 1985 and 2007, eaten up by the ever-expanding palm and acacia plantations that feed global demand for palm oil and paper.
But in Southeast Asia’s largest economy the hunger for forests reaches far beyond big business. Unprecedented growth has brought increased competition for land. Up to 50 million landless farmers vie with corporate giants and conservation projects alike for ever scarcer forests and the fertile earth they shelter.
Powerful companies control around 70% of Indonesia’s agricultural land and forests. National parks and forests earmarked for conservation make up most of the rest. Little remains for small-scale farmers.
Migrant farmers from overcrowded Java cut trees and set fires to clear land for cash crops like palm, rubber and rice. This brings them into inevitable conflict with forest managers.
Many of these migrants have been in Sumatra for generations. Up to 15 million of them were coaxed from overcrowded Java during the administration of president Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for 31 years after seizing power in a 1966 coup.
But many more are newcomers. Ruthless frontiersmen and well-connected local speculators lure them with the promise of cheap land, selling bogus land rights in poorly guarded forests and plantations. Since 2000, the number of settler families living within Harapan’s boundaries has grown from 12 to 3,000.
The week before Sanders and his team were standing guard at the Harapan camp, police had arrested 11 settlers within the forest. They claimed to be members of Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI), a national movement of landless farmers and member of the global peasant movement, Vía Campesina.
The arrests took place at an SPI settlement within the forest known as Sei Jerat, located less than 32km (20 miles) along rough muddy trails from the Harapan camp. Police heard the sound of chainsaws, caught a group of men cutting deeper into the forest, and packed them off to a jail in Jambi.
Shortly afterwards, police sent word that settlers planned to retaliate for the arrests with an attack on Harapan’s headquarters. It was the latest escalation in the fight for Harapan and the reason why Sanders and his men were keeping watch that October morning.
But the threatened assault never came. Faced with the possibility of conflict, police released the prisoners on the eve of the promised attack, along with their chainsaws. The 40 officers that had gathered to defend the camp went home.
Harapan employs around 60 unarmed forest guards at any given time. They use satellite imagery, analysed 7,000 miles away by a Dutch company called SARvision, to track changes to the forest from month to month. Using this intelligence, teams of forest guards investigate the changes on the ground. More often than not, it is farmers cutting down trees and setting fires to clear land for crops.
But despite their technological edge, Harapan has been unable to keep the encroachment at bay. Forest police seldom move to enforce forest law in Harapan. It is easy to understand why.
In April 2012, a group of farmers kidnapped two Harapan guards and held them overnight. They demanded the release of six men arrested for cutting down trees the day before. Police gave in to the demands and released the six men, along with their confiscated chainsaws. The two Harapan guards were released. This set a precedent that would determine the outcome to subsequent standoffs within the forest.
Tensions within Harapan reached their peak in December 2012. Forest police moved in to destroy houses built by SPI affiliated farmers within the forest. A house owned by an influential local SPI leader known as Sukiran was set alight and burned to the ground. Police withdrew when a crowd of 300 or so men confronted them with knives, machetes and wooden clubs.
Three months after the standoff that October morning, a handful of paramilitary police officers, known as BRIMOB, sat around on metal cots at a Harapan guard post. They wore t-shirts and camouflage basketball vests with pictures of commandos in body armour and slogans in English that read ‘terrorist buster’ and ‘Indonesian Special Police.’ They stood and slung their automatic rifles as Sanders arrived for a visit.
Their guard post was a makeshift pondok, or wooden house, surrounded by a five-foot deep moat with crisscross lines of barbed wire at the bottom. A list of previous groups of officers to rotate through the post was scrawled in black paint on the outside of the house. In the middle distance, across barricades and a stretch of tree stumps and charred scrub, pale yellow SPI flags flew against a blue-gray sky over the settlement at Sei Jerat.
Sei Jerat is reached by motorbike along rough winding trails through vast areas of cleared forest. There, one morning in late December 2012, the farmer known as Sukiran sat in front of a small wooden house with a tin roof. He drank hot sweet tea with a group of SPI lieutenants as his wife prepared food inside.
“We are going to stand” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “If Harapan once again tries to remove us, we will fight. We have nowhere to go. This is where we belong.”
Six months later, on July 4th 2013, Sukiran was arrested and imprisoned in connection with the kidnappings that took place in April 2012.
Negotiations with some settler communities living within the forest have the potential to bear fruit. Harapan recently proposed a ‘collaboration zone’ made up of the forest’s most encroached areas. Under the plan, settlers could remain for an agreed period in return for a 30% share of proceeds from the sale of their crops. They would also have to move towards livelihoods that don’t harm the forest.
Tim Stowe, the RSPB’s international director, said in a statement: “There are few conservation issues as vital or as challenging as safeguarding rainforests. Harapan rainforest in Sumatra accounts for a quarter of this type of forest left in the world. Thankfully, the situation has moved on considerably since 2012 and the rate of illegal encroachment has slowed.
“But across Indonesia and, indeed, across the tropics, clearance is still a massive issue threatening these great forests’ future. Given this imperative, the RSPB is proud to work with our BirdLife International partners to conserve one of the world’s richest wildlife habitats.”
Over time, Harapan aims to become the leading centre of knowledge on how to bring damaged forest ecosystems back to health. Tropical rainforests develop over thousands of years. It is not yet known how long it takes to fully restore a damaged rainforest to health, or if it is possible at all.
There is little doubt that the forests that make up Harapan would have been completely destroyed by now was it not for the efforts of the RSPB and its partners to protect and restore them.
Despite ongoing losses to encroachment, Harapan still has a relatively large percentage of forest cover within its boundaries. Much of the surrounding forests have been completely decimated and replaced by palm plantations.