Indonesian President Joko Widodo (right) and Walhi Executive Director Abetnego Tarigan (centre) come to Sungai Tohor village. Credit: Walhi/Friends of the Earth Indonesia

By Jeff Conant
JAKARTA, Dec 5 2014 (IPS)

Last week, Indonesia’s new president, Joko Widodo, ordered the country’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry to review the licenses of all companies that have converted peatlands to oil palm plantations.

If the ministry follows through, this will be one of the most important actions the Indonesian government can take to begin truly reining in the destruction reaped by the palm oil industry there – and to address the severe climate impacts of peatland destruction.“The best thing to do is to give the land to people... They won’t do any harm to nature. However, if we give the land to corporations, they will only switch it to monoculture plantations.” -- President Widodo

The Indonesian Forum on the Environment, known as WALHI/Friends of the Earth Indonesia, has been pushing for this initiative, and the announcement was made in the village of River Tohor, in Riau Province, where WALHI has long worked with the community.

Walhi had invited Jokowi, as the president is casually known, to come to Riau because the province is ground zero for Indonesia’s massive haze crisis that comes from the near-constant burning of carbon-rich peatlands in order to convert these fragile ecosystems to plantations.

“We invited him to River Tohor to demonstrate the community’s success in preserving the peat forest ecosystem,” said Zenzi Suhadi, forest campaigner for Walhi.

“We hoped this visit would show the president that community management can protect forests, and that granting concessions to companies is the wrong approach,” Suhadi said.

The strategy appears to have succeeded, as Walhi hailed President Jokowi’s Riau visit as proof of his commitment to solving ecological problems.

“The best thing to do is to give the land to people,” the president told the Jakarta Globe. “What’s made by people is usually environmentally friendly. They won’t do any harm to nature. However, if we give the land to corporations, they will only switch it to monoculture plantations.”

“I have told the minister of environment and forestry to review the licenses of companies that have converted peatlands into monoculture plantations if they are found damaging the ecosystem,” Jokowi said. “There is no other solution to the issue; everyone understands what must be done.” 

Peatlands – waterlogged vegetable soils that make up a significant portion of Indonesia’s rainforests – are great storehouses of carbon dioxide. The widespread practice of draining and burning peat to develop palm-oil and other plantation crops makes Indonesia the world’s third largest emitter of global warming pollution, after China and the United States.

Taking strong measures to prevent this practice may be the single best action Indonesia can take in the fight to curb the climate crisis.

Palm oil producers have fought long to preserve the ability to clear peatlands. When Wilmar International, among the world’s largest palm oil traders, announced last year that it would stop trading palm oil grown on cleared peatlands, some suppliers pushed back, saying it would not only harm the industry, but would set back the economic development of smallholder farmers.

Jokowi appears to have taken the economic argument to heart: he made the announcement to audit palm oil concession licenses after joining the local community to plant seedlings of sago, a native palm species that is harvested for its starchy tapioca-like pith, a food product that can be sold locally or for export.

“The president’s decision to audit concession licenses to protect peat puts the interests of citizens ahead of the interests of the industry,” said Suhadi.

“This is an acknowledgment that the people of Indonesia have been waiting on for decades,” Suhadi continued. “Finally it is recognized that government must foster trust in people to be the first to protect forests.”

Jokowi’s move came shortly after his government announced a four- to six-month moratorium on all new logging concessions. That prohibition goes beyond the 2011 nationwide moratorium on new concessions across more than 14 million hectares of forests and peatlands

The move also comes on the heels of Jokowi’s announcement that the Ministry of Forests and the Ministry of Environment would be combined into one ministry, headed by Siti Nurbaya – a move that not all see as positive but that does signal a radical effort to restructure the way the government manages lands and resources.

Jokowi has also pledged to clean up Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt forestry sector as a step toward reducing deforestation.

Walhi Executive Director Abetnego Tarigan says the president must soon follow up the visit with “concrete actions” in the form of firm law enforcement.

“Among the concrete actions that President Jokowi can immediately take is ordering the termination concessions for companies proven to have been involved in forest and land fires,” Abetnego said.

“Law enforcement must continue legal action against companies that have been named suspects, as well as develop investigations into companies that civilians have filed reports against,” he added.

The environmental and social degradation caused by the palm oil is founded upon corruption and illegality, Walhi argues.

“In order to begin restoring forests and returning rights to the people,” says Suhadi, “the large companies need to be the first target of the government. President Jokowi needs to streamline the ability of law enforcement to take action against these companies as part of a national movement to reclaim citizen’s rights to lands and livelihoods.

“As it is now, law enforcement agencies are part of the corporate crime wave that undermines peoples’ rights. The first duty of the government is to improve law enforcement in the forest sector.”

It appears that, after decades of growing corruption and the massive deforestation, climate pollution and social conflict that has followed from it, Indonesia’s new president may be serious about bringing much-needed change.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Field of soy in Não-Me-Toque, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Credit: Nilson Konrad/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 17 2013 (IPS)

Crop yields in Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse, are set to decline as a result of climate change, according to the most complete diagnosis yet of climate trends in this country.

Brazil is about to overtake the United States as the world’s top producer of soy, which could see yields fall 25 percent by 2050. Drops in productivity are also projected for beans, rice, maize, sugar cane, coffee and oranges.

Some of these products already saw declines in this year’s harvests.

The first exhaustive report on climate change in South America’s giant predicts that temperatures could be three to six degrees C higher by 2100, and says agricultural losses will be one of the most notable effects.

The report’s chapter on agriculture estimates that the sector will suffer some 3.1 billion dollars a year in losses after 2020.

“If temperatures continue to go up and down, like what is happening, we will have strong waves of heat and cold and losses in agricultural productivity,” Eduardo Assad, a researcher with Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, and one of the authors of the report, told IPS.

Some of the food products mentioned in the report are staples of the Brazilian diet.

That means “we are without a doubt talking about food security,” Carlos Rittl, the head of the climate change and energy programme of WWF-Brazil, told IPS.

The report is the first of a series of three to be published by the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change, which was created in 2009 by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of the Environment.

This first volume, which focuses on the scientific aspects of global warming, is a compilation of studies by 345 researchers.

It was presented at the first national conference on climate change, held Sept. 9 to 13 in the southern city of São Paulo. The next two volumes will come out in October and November.

The data from the first volume will be included in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, part of which will be published on Sept. 27.

The heat, aggravated by a shortage of rainfall, could reduce the water levels in the country’s rivers and lead to a decline in groundwater supplies if emissions of greenhouse gases are not reduced, the report says.

“We have already been affected,” said Rittl, who has a doctorate in ecology. “We are suffering increasingly frequent extreme meteorological events, storms, flooding, intense rains, associated with landslides and other disasters like the ones we had in the hilly areas of Rio de Janeiro (in 2011) or extreme drought like what we have seen in the Northeast,” he said.

These droughts can drag on “for years, leaving agriculture without water and people without drinking water, and accelerating the desertification process,” he added.

In the Amazon jungle, rainfall could decline by 45 percent. A drop in water in the rainforest, where a large number of hydroelectric dams are being built, would pose risks to the country’s energy supply.

In the pampas grasslands in the south and southeast, rainfall will rise 40 percent, causing more floods, Rittl said.

“In very poor areas of the Northeast, subsistence farming will suffer severe consequences, aggravating poverty and fuelling migration to urban areas,” he added.

Food supplies in Brazil depend heavily on family farming. “But in some regions, it won’t b possible to produce crops anymore,” he said.

Assad, however, stressed that the report did not reach the conclusion that food insecurity would increase in Brazil, although “a possible change in the geography of agriculture should be expected,” he said.

Researchers at Embrapa and the University of Campinas show that the coffee-growing areas of the southeast will no longer be suitable for the crop.

Embrapa is already working to develop more climate-resistant strains of coffee. It is also seeking more adaptable soy, maize and sorghum, as well as a kind of bean tolerant of high temperatures.

The report does not offer news with respect to climate scenarios, which have already been projected in Brazil. But because it systematises existing knowledge while revealing gaps in information, it is a roadmap for future research.

In 2009, Brazil committed itself to cutting greenhouse gas emissions between 36 and 39 percent, based on two scenarios of GDP growth.

The government says it is already two-thirds of the way towards that goal, thanks to the marked reduction in the deforestation rate.

But although advances have been made in that area, and a low-carbon agriculture plan (ABC) has been drawn up, climate change “is not a priority issue for the government” of Dilma Rousseff, according to Rittl.

He compared the 1.6 billion dollars spent by the government on ABC in 2011 and 2012 to the nearly 50 billion dollars in agribusiness incentives.

“The big investment is still in traditional agriculture, which produces emissions,” he said.

Agriculture and energy “together account for 90 percent or more of the country’s emissions,” the expert said.

Assad mentioned things that are being done, such as investment in mixed agricultural systems – farming, livestock and forestry, recovery of degraded grasslands, greater use of direct planting or no-till farming, and biological fixing of nitrogen.

“We are implementing systems that capture, instead of emitting, carbon,” he said.

The aim is to reach 2020 with 20 million hectares cultivated using these methods. ”If monoculture continues, we’ll have problems, because with more rain and moisture, there will be more pests and plant diseases,” he said.

The expansion of the main monoculture crop, soy, is one of the causes of soil degradation and deforestation.

“The big agricultural sectors that used to believe that climate change wasn’t important now see that they are also vulnerable, and have become our allies,” Assad said.

But all of these methods and plans will fall short if the different ministries, “which do not communicate among themselves, do not start working together,” said Rittl. “We have to be much more prepared for the consequences if we’re going to confront this.”