By IPS Correspondents
FLORES ISLAND, Jul 20 2006 (IPS)

At the age of 60, Wilhemus Handur should have been enjoying his retirement. Instead, the father of seven has to think hard how to earn enough money to buy rice for his family’s daily consumption.

This is a distressing reality for 27 other families in Bandang village. Till the late 1990s, they supplied more than 50 percent of rice harvests to the Satar Lenda subdistrict in Manggarai regency.

The regency is at the western tip of Flores Island in the East Nusa Tenggara province, located some 1,300 km east of the capital Jakarta.

Handur and other Bandang villagers used to harvest more than three tonnes of rice per hectare. Now, they have to buy rice from the market – at no small cost to them.

The price of rice is more than 3,000 rupiah (33 US cents) per kg, up from 1,500 (17 cents) rupiah. During the dry season, this could go up to 5,000 rupiah (55 cents) per kg.

”We’ve stopped planting rice in our paddy fields in Nanga Bandang due to severe lack of water,” said Handur, who has five hectares of paddy fields in the subdistrict’s first irrigated rice fields.

In the neighbouring villages of Lenggos, Kombo, Cepang, Nikeng and Paka, farmers have had to limit their planting season to once a year as the waters in the Wae Ntijo river have also declined.

The Wae Aweng and Wae Ntijo rivers could no longer irrigate more than 780 hectares of rice fields in the sub-district due to massive land clearance for dry-land farming and logging activities, which drastically reduced water levels.

“We have to take turns planting our rice fields to avoid conflicts over water,” said Antonius Oto, a local water committee member.

In 1982, local authorities introduced a water rationing policy. The water committee is in charge of ensuring that the scheduling of water supply is complied with and that sanctions are imposed against violators.

Nikeng villager Karolus Hambur, however, noted that even with the water rationing policy in place, conflicts over irrigation water already arose in the subdistrict over the past few years. They are only expected to worsen in the coming years.

Hambur recalled that last year, several farmers, armed with machetes and spears, engaged in heated quarrels over water distribution.

Under the current arrangement, rice fields located near Nikeng village are planted in November and the water stays with them until April. Farmers around Lenggos, Kombo and Cepang villages plant their rice fields in May and the water stays until October.

Farmers who tried to plant rice beyond the scheduled period were immediately stopped by the committee and asked to pay a fine of up to 1 million rupiah (109 dollars), a burdensome amount for people whose annual per capita income stands at 1.5 million rupiah (164 dollars).

However, the water rationing policy has adversely affected rice growing in the sub-district of over 5,000 people.

Up to 87 percent of the workforce in Manggarai regency consists of elementary graduates due to inaccessibility of schools and poverty. At least 69,605 of the regency’s 103,838 families, or 67 percent, are considered poor.

Nikeng villager Sebastianus Jomar, for instance, harvests only 580 kg of rice every planting season to support his three children, wife and paralysed father throughout the year. Very often, Jomar has to sell his rice harvest to meet other needs, including buying dried fish and cheap clothes in the market.

“The 580 kg of rice is not enough for my family. I start buying rice in October, before the planting season begins,” said Jomar, who sometimes ploughs the rice fields of other farmers for a fee of 10,000 rupiah (about one dollar) per day to support his family.

The low purchasing power has resulted in the high levels of undernourishment among residents of Satar Lenda and Manggarai. Data show that almost 27 percent of Manggarai residents are undernourished.

“Most of the time, my family has to make do with plain rice, cassava and papaya leaves,” said Jomar, who missed the government’s direct cash subsidy for the past two years. Manggarai residents eat papaya leaves to combat malaria, one of the most common diseases in the regency.

To ease the impact of rising commodity prices triggered by soaring prices in the international market, the central government introduced in 2005 direct fuel subsidy for 17 million poor families across the country. Under the programme, each poor family receives 100,000 rupiah (11 dollars) per month. Over 73,000 families in Manggarai are registered recipients of the programme.

In his report to the ministry for the development of backward areas, Manggarai regent Christian Rotok said 11,342 hectares, or 9.6 percent, of the regency’s 118,772 protected forests have been cleared for farming, residential areas and other public facilities in the past few decades.

“Residents living near forests have converted protected and productive forests into traditional farming, resulting in critical land areas in the regency,” Rotok said. The head of the Manggarai Development Planning Agency, Frans Salesman, said more than 50,000 of the regency’s 271,000 hectares of forests are in critical condition. Reforestation is the key to increasing water volume there.

“The critical areas have not only caused erosion that reduce the soil’s fertility, but also cut underground water deposits both for drinking and irrigation,” Salesman said.

Most farmers in Manggarai have shifted to slash-and-burn farming. They plant coffee, turmeric or cashew for three to four years before moving on to clear other forested areas. Hundreds of hectares of forests, upstream of Wae Aweng River, have been cleared by Nikeng villagers in the past three decades.

While shifting cultivation or slash-and-burn farming has been carried out for generations in Manggarai, it has become more frequent lately due to the growing population in the regency, which grows by an average of 1.92 percent per year.

“As the demand for dry-farm areas rises, agricultural lands previously untouched for over 40 years are now cleared after just 10 or 15 years,” said Fabianus Hadur, village head of Nikeng.

Logging activities in protected forests are also to blame for the declining water volume in the Wae Aweng and Wae Ntijo rivers. “I once travelled up the Wae Aweng River and I was really startled that I could not find one single big tree there,” Hadur said in disbelief.

(*Asia Water Wire is a series of news and features, coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific, on water and development from the region.)

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