The Market Distorting Effects of "Free Land" at Kerinci Seblat National Park

Encroacher dwelling inside KSNP

I just returned from a trip to the field where I visited an area that is experiencing a pretty high rate of forest encroachment.  One of the hypotheses that I had when I started doing my fieldwork is that the park has become a kind of subsidy for the districts around it.  According to this hypothesis, people farming illegally in the park produce commodities that are then sold on the market, which provides income to the district.  At the same time, I assumed that because the park absorbs excess labor, the surrounding districts are under less pressure to spend money for things like job training or other programs that would increase opportunities for those that have none.  Thus I was expecting to find encroachment on the part of small-scale farmers and the occasional industrial plantation that had planted some oil palms or other tree crops in the park on the sly.  I have found both of these, but it is the existence of another driver of forest encroachment that has led me to the idea that I'm going to describe in this post.  In many places around the park where encroachment is rampant I've found that local officials, including district headmen, police officials, army officers, and the higher-ups at the various district offices have actually "invested" in park land; they have opened up land in the park and hired laborers to cultivate it.

The Kerinci Seblat National Park Gold Rush....

Forest encroachment is currently the number one threat to the integrity of Kerinci Seblat National Park.  "Encroachment" means that someone, either an individual or a corporation, clears park land and converts the forest to agriculture.  Thousands upon thousands of hectares of forest land have been lost to encroachment, and the park seems to be powerless to stop the trend.  This has been a problem for a long time, but the trend seems to have increased since regional autonomy laws were passed in the wake of the fall of longtime dictator Suharto in the late 1990s.  These reforms devolved a lot of power to the district governments, which formally had been part of a top-down authoritarian system directed from Jakarta.  Now districts have more control over their budgets and who gets hired to work for the district government.  Also significant is the fact that district assemblies and headmen are democratically elected.

As I mentioned in the introduction, a significant amount of encroachment is indeed done by individuals, and there are some corporations that "cheat" on their concessions (which are often at the edge of the park) by cultivating in the park.  Much of this is because of a lack of enforcement, but to be far the park doesn't have nearly the requisite manpower needed to effectively patrol its 2500-kilometer border.  But I've also found that a great deal of land opened up in the park is "owned" by district officials.  One village secretary in an encroachment-prone area told me as much as 30% of the land was owned by district officials.  These people don't actually work the land themselves; rather they pay laborers to do it.  Sometimes these laborers are other farmers that work the land as a side job, sometimes they are people from outside the region that are attracted to the park because of work opportunities.  These newcomers often become landowners themselves after some time working as laborers.

Much of the park's land is quite fertile because it's never been farmed and the soil is volcanic in origin.  High yields draw people in, but besides that the park land is essentially free in most cases for anyone that wants to open it up.  Thus illegal farmers often experience very high rates of return for short periods of time; I've heard that the standard rule is that people expect a 100% return on their initial investment in a period as short as 2 years.  As you can imagine, with so many local government officials gaining from illegal cultivation, there isn't much incentive on the part of the local government to do anything about the problem.  On the other hand, there is a great deal of incentive to make infrastructural improvements, like better roads, to encroachment areas, because this increases profit by decreasing transport times and costs.  Higher profitability will in turn draw more people to the area to open up more land.  

Encroachment and the Market for Land...

Another phenomenon I've noticed in my fieldwork is that the farmers often use relatively unsustainable, inefficient methods to grow crops.  They tend to use a lot of fertilizer and pesticides, and they really push the land for maximum yields, which in the medium and long term will exhaust the soil making it virtually useless.  There is a lot of erosion as well.  When I ask farmers why they do this they tell me that they don't know any other way to farm.  However there is a small percentage of farmers, maybe 20%, that have actual training in agriculture.  The yields as well as the long-term sustainability of these farmers far out-perform those of their less-skilled neighbors.  This has always perplexed me because this is an agricultural society, and they've been farming for hundreds of years.  Thus I expected that there would be a fairly high level of "traditional ecological knowledge" (TEK) which has been handed down from generation to generation.  But this isn't the case.

I think this is because the land in the park is free, and so it distorts the market value of all the land in the districts causing land to be used in less-than-efficient ways.  If you have to pay for land, you will make sure that you get the most out of it.  But if land is free and readily available, you have less incentive to ensure that the land continues to produce over the long term.  In addition, in most places here the rural population is growing.  Now according to orthodox economic development theory, you would expect to see, in a developing country like Indonesia, people leaving the land to move to urban areas.  They leave because there are no opportunities in the village.  While this influx of people into metropolitan areas comes with its own raft of problems, it provides a ready supply of cheap labor for industrialization and economic development in the city.  And according to the orthodox thinking, while most new city residence will experience a certain degree of misery since they live under overpasses or along train corridors and other marginal places, eventually they will move out of these areas as they integrate themselves into the urban economy.  So it's a stepping stone.  While we observe this dynamic in Jakarta on Java, where all the land has been exhausted, it doesn't seem to be happening to the same degree here on Sumatra.  I think this is possibly because protected forests have assumed at least some of the role cities are supposed to have in the absorption of excess labor.  Instead of moving to the city, people just stake a claim in a national park or other protected area.  I believe this has negative impacts not only for the environment, but from a macroeconomic standpoint for the greater economy in general.

Capital Formation and Development...

From the standpoint of economic development, one key determinant in healthy, growing economies is capital formation.  "Capital formation" refers to "the transfer of savings from households and governments to the business sector, resulting in increased output and economic expansion".  In other words, capital formation happens when surplus income from lots and lots of households is gathered together, forming a pool of money that can be used to invest in businesses.  Theoretically banks play a really key role in this process because people save their money in banks, and then the banks loan out the money to businesses or individual entrepreneurs to invest in some enterprise that will bring greater returns down the road.  So if you have a great idea for a business but don't have enough money to get it started, the idea is that you can go to the bank, convince them to give you a loan, and implement your vision.  Stock markets, at least theoretically, are supposed to operate along the same lines.  Thus according to this minute bit of economic theory, savings rates are very important in economic development.  In fact if you look at analyses of the Japanese Miracle period of development in the 50s and 60s when that country was shattering all previous records for economic growth, or at South Korea and Singapore as more recent examples, you'll find that the traditionally high rates of savings in those countries is considered to be instrumental in the high economic growth rates.


Why is this important for Kerinci Seblat National Park?  Well, I believe there is a strong possibility that the "gold rush" I described above undermines capital formation at the local level.  Since so many people are "investing" in land within the park, there is less capital available to entrepreneurs and other enterprises.  In addition to this, the high rates of return on illegal cultivation skew people's expectations about returns on investment.  Remember, we are talking about a 100% return on investment within 2-4 years.  However, when you invest in a bank the best rate you are going to get is somewhere around 3%, which leads to a 100% return on your investment in a bit more than 23 years.  With the stock market the best you are going to get is 10%, and that's really good, but you only double your money every 7 years at that rate.  So as you can see, it makes more economic sense to invest in park land as long as you can get away with it.  In addition to limiting capital available for economic development, I think the easy availability of free land also probably stymies local creativity; instead of trying to identify a new way to make money people that have a surplus simply open up new land.  At the same time capital formation makes money available to local governments in the form of bonds.  In the US, when a municipality or county government wants to make improvements to say, the sewage system, they probably don't have enough tax revenue to pay for the expensive improvements all at once.  In this case they will often sell bonds to the public, which is essentially a loan.  Thus they can raise a lot of money all at once to pay for infrastructure improvements.  People buy the bonds because there is an interest rate and so they get a return, and because the bonds are issued by the government they feel reasonably confident that there isn't going to be a default.

In Indonesia, at least in the places I work on Sumatra, they don't use the bond system.  Rather to fund projects most district governments, because they aren't able to raise very much money themselves, rely on grants from the central government.  But these funds are directed from the top down; in other words the district government doesn't get to decide what the money is spent on.  I've heard many district officials complain about how funds from the central government aren't consistent with local needs.  And because the money comes from outside the district there is usually a pretty high level of corruption involved (skimming money off the top, inflated budgets, etc).  I think that relying more on bonds would have two positive effects: 1) it would allow the district governments more freedom in deciding how money is spent, and 2) since the debt would be "owned" by local people there would be more accountability in how the funds are spent.  People aren't likely to buy bonds if they know a good bit of the money is going to be wasted on corruption.

This is my current thinking on the structure of encroachment at the park, and though there are a lot of assumptions this model seems to fit all the data I've gathered in the field and everything I've seen and heard while on the ground.  There is a lot going on here, and it will take me some time to really analyze my data to see if I'm right.  In addition, though I have some passing knowledge of everything I've described in this post, much of it, including the parts about capital formation, are outside my expertise as a geographer.  So when I get back to the University of Hawai'i and start writing my dissertation I'll have some work to do to bring myself up to speed on these issues.  But as a working model I think this is pretty good because it goes to show how complex the encroachment problem actually is, and how to really understand it we need to see it in the context of the bigger economic and social picture.  

The Road to Tanjung Kasri...

This is the second of three posts describing my recent trip to the Serampas region of Sumatra.  My assistant and I hiked from Kerinci district to Serampas last week to visit some villages that lie within Kerinci Seblat National Park to learn about the way farmers cope with living inside a protected area.  The villages of Renah Kemumu (previous post) and Tanjung Kasri are completely located within the park, and so under Indonesian law they are technically illegal, though there is an informal agreement between the park and the village residents.  However, the illegal status prevents district funds from being used to improve infrastructure in and around the villages.  The story is also complicated by the fact that, according to the villagers, they and their ancestors have been in Serampas for 800 years, whereas the park was formally decreed only in the 1990s.

Getting to Tanjung Kasri

I had originally planned to visit Renah Kemumu and Rantau Kermas only, because the latter received a significant amount of development aid from the World Bank back in the late 90s whereas the former didn't, and so I thought it would be interesting to compare the two.  However, when I was in Renah Kemumu I was told that it would cost a total of 300,000 rupiah (approximately $33) per person just to get to Rantau Kermas, and then I would need to think about getting back.  This would have cut into my "buy your way out of trouble" reserve, and so I decided to scrap the visit to Rantau Kermas and visit the next village, Tanjung Kasri, instead.  Since there's a "road" between the two villages, I decided we'd drop our mess kits and other superfluous gear (including the batik shirt I brought for meetings with village heads; I soon learned that in Serampas camo pants and sweat soaked shirts are formal attire) and hump the 15 kilometers through the hills.  How hard could it be, right?

The answer to that question is "pretty %&$#*#$ hard".  The road is much steeper, and at one point I was on a hill that made me feel like I was in some sort of Sisyphan hell designed just for me.  It took me about 5 hours to make it to Tanjung Kasri.  About a kilometer and a half out of town my assistant road by on the back of a farmer's stepthrough and waved at me.  "See you in Tanjung Kasri", he smiled.  Indeed.  By the time I got into town I was beat from the sun and the climb, but fortunately my assistant had a cousin there who we ended up staying with, so I spared him the angry words I'd been preparing in my head as I staggered the last bit of the way.

The road is through the national park, and so it required special permission to be built, which took a number of years.  Previously it was hardened gravel, but the new approval allows for a paved 2-meter wide road, the theory being that it would improve access while preventing big trucks, which are used for illegal logging, from entering the park.  Currently approximately 10% of the way is concrete (1), but the the steep roadcuts with no buttressing combined with the heavy rainfall has led to a significant amount of erosion and gullying.  It's still tough to make the trip, and in the rainy season it's impossible to pass.  There are a couple of rivers that have to be forded by 4-wheeled vehicles as you can see in the video below, but there are plans to build bridges in the next couple of years.  I made the video on the way back, and my new friend, the village secretary from Renah Kemumu, was out in the middle of the river with a hardhat clearing the way.  The truck is filled with goods for his small store, one of two in the village.

About an hour and a half walking (20 minutes by motorcycle) you can stop at Grao Sakti, a hot spring set right by a nice stream.  The hot spring is designated a "tourist site", but it doesn't get many visitors due to the isolation of the area and the lack of publication.  This is a real shame, because the place is really nice.  Locals say you can bath in the waters and boil eggs, but I wasn't really in the mood.  Still this is the most spectacular hot spring I've seen in Indonesia, and if it were located any place else it would be fully developed with bathing facilities.  As it is there is a "homestay", a shack built across the river for visitors, but from what I understand no one ever uses it.  While we were at the hot spring we saw some guys that had killed a deer ("rusa"), which is technically poaching.  The area is a good place for hunting because animals come for the salt that comes up with the water.  My assistant wanted to go chat with the hunters, but I find it's usually best to leave folks engaged in illegal activities alone, especially when they are armed and you're in the middle of the jungle.  The hunters take the meat for personal consumption or to sell for about 30,000 rupiah (US$3.33) per kilogram, which is much cheaper than beef or goat, which is consumed only on special occasions.

Life in Tanjung Kasri

Being closer to the main transport artery, gas and goods are cheaper in Tanjung Kasri than they are in Renah Kemumu.  In addition, the margin of profit for agricultural products is higher.  All of this is reflected in the appearance of the village.  There are about 110 households in Tanjung Kasri, and 85% of them are coffee farmers.  There is a rule in the village that compels farmers to grow coffee because it is seen as a way to improve the economy of the village and because it supposedly draws less ire from the national park authorities, given that it's a tree crop.  Before coffee was adopted most farmers harvest cinnamon from trees planted over the years.  The folks say that transportation is still the biggest concern, but the new road to Rantau Kermas (see next post) helps.  It costs 1000 rupiah (US$.12) per kilogram to get goods to or from the main road at Danau Pauh, as opposed to 2000 rupiah in Renah Kemumu.  The local folks also resent the park because they have yet to be granted formal control of their land.  The land is very fertile, and the farmers don't use fertilizer or pesticide, so they produce organically.  In other places around the park the fertile land under the forests draws outsiders who clear the trees for cultivation, but Tanjung Kasri has succeeded in keeping outsiders out, in part because of their customary (adat) law.  Most of the people in the village feel that they are due some sort of compensation from the park, since they claim they've been protecting the forest for ages.

Jono, Con, and Chua (RA) at the Batu Larung

If you make it to Tanjung Kasri, you can ask one of the locals to take you to a nearby megalith, called batu larung in the local language.  This artifact is located probably around 5 kilometers from the village, depending on who's fields you cut through.  It's located in the middle of a coffee gardlen and was pretty well overgrown before my new friends cleared away the growth.  The locals don't pay too much attention to the megalith; they don't know where it came from and many consider it to be a relic of the days before Islam came to the area, and so it's blasphemous.  Others say it is a relic of the "battle between the mountains", the result of one mountain attacking another.  It's about 4-5 meters long, and is carved on both ends.  One end has a carving of a man, the other (in the picture), a woman.  On one side it's flat, and so it appears that maybe it was toppled over at one point, possibly by people looking for treasure beneath.  This megalith is one of several scattered throughout the wider region, as you can see from the map below.  I couldn't find any information about what era they might be from, but it looks pretty old.

Map from David Neidel's PhD dissertation; see references.

You can also poach birds from the park if you are so inclined.  All the men in the village carry air rifles, which while not a "man's weapon" (i.e. a Winchester), are sufficient to send birds to their reward.  While songbirds are taken to sell, some are also eaten since there's not much meat around.  I witnessed a significant amount of bird shooting; farmers "hunt" opportunistically while they are working in their coffee gardens and some folks walk the village trails looking for birds.  I witnessed an interesting innovation: the use of cell phones to call the birds.  Some of the folks I have met have bird songs recorded on their phones and when they are walking through the forest they play the song on the external speaker, which attracts their quarry.  I recorded a few of the songs on my voice recorder and made "movies" so you can get the idea.

The first bird is a Murai Batu, which according to my bird expert buddy is Copsychus malabaricus, or Whited-Rumped Shama.  You can see it in the picture that goes along with the recording.

The second bird is Cucuak Daun, or Chloropsis sp.  One of a variety of leafbirds found in the area.

The last bird is Copsychus saularis.  Locally known as the kacer, this is an oriental magpie robin.  I'm not sure if the hunting of these birds or the rusa mentioned earlier makes a dent in the natural populations, but they are all supposed to be protected by the park.  Most populations can stand some hunting for local consumption but problems arise when the creatures are sold in outside markets.

I had a very productive experience in Tanjung Kasri and met a lot of people.  This is a town that only sees foreigners every couple of years or so, so everyone was very curious about me.  After two days here we continued down the road to Rantau Kermas instead of heading back to Renah Kemumu because we found that transportation is actually a lot cheaper than we were told in the first village.  But that's Sumatra for you; anything to do with prices, times, or distances is highly subjective here.  In the next post I'll talk about the village of Rantau Kermas.  

Notes

(1)  Like most infrastructure projects in Indonesia, a significant amount of the money allocated for the road was skimmed by politicians and contractors, and so the whole things hasn't been completed.

References


Neidel, David.  2006.  The Garden of Forking Paths.  History, its Erasure and Remembrance in Sumatra's Kerinci Seblat National Park.  PhD dissertation.  Yale University.

Revisting Gunung Tujuh: The Political Ecology of Forest Encroachment

A couple of days ago I made my way back to Gunung Tujuh, the site of several villages bordering on Kerinci Seblat National Park.  I'd previous visited the villages a few months back and had been meaning to return, but the sabotage of the reforestration project I discussed in a previous post gave me immediate cause to make a repeat visit (1).  As it turns out, somebody (or more likely, somebodies) took an industrial sprayer filled with herbicide to 500 hectares of tree seedlings, destroying approximately 1/3 of the 1500 hectare project.  I wanted to find out who was responsible or at least why they did it, so I scheduled a meeting with some of the village heads.

I had a number of questions prepared for the village heads.  I wanted to know about how land is managed in the villages.  I also wanted to learn about social aspects of the villages, including the education system.  I was curious about the history of the villages and wanted to hear their take on the conflicts with the park, since these villages have a particularly contentious history with the park authorities.  I learned that the villages were founded back in the 1960s and were originally settled by people moving out of more crowded areas of Kerinci Valley.  At that time there was no national park, and the Basic Forestry law, which gave the central government formal authority over all forested areas in Indonesia, had not yet been passed.  Thus at that time migrating villagers, at least in this part of Sumatra, were free to open up new land for cultivation, as they'd been doing for hundreds of years previously.

I learned a great deal talking to the village heads.  They were happy to talk to me about their troubles with the park and seemed glad that someone was paying attention to them.  We talked about population dynamics, including birthrates and in/outmigration.  We talked about schools and educational opportunties (or lack thereof)  We also talked about the life of a farmer in here in the hills.  All of the folks I spoke with felt that they were being treated unfairly by the park, while at the same time they didn't feel like anyone in the regional government was interested in their plight.  One of the village officials I spoke with told me that, before the park was officially designated, the members of the village met with representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture to map out where the borders of the park ought to go.  They went so far as to physically construct border markers on the ridge behind their ladangs (cultivated fields).  According to the story, though, the park's planners had different ideas and drew the borders in such a way that 60% of the villages' cultivated land would fall inside the park's boundaries.

Then I headed to one of the small dry goods shops in the middle of one of the villages.  As a foreigner in remote Sumatra I always draw a lot of attention from people that are milling about.  People gather around because they are curious and want to know what I'm up to and where I'm from, and it's always a friendly interaction.  At the same time this is a good way for me to get information as to what's going on in the area and how people are doing.  I figured maybe I'd get the scuttlebutt on the aforementioned forest sabotage, but the topic didn't come up, though we did have a pretty good conversation about how women are like the weather.  Maybe next time.  But I did learn enough to formulate a theory as to why forest encroachment is so problematic in this area.

Political Ecology?

Scale Diagram from Wilson, 2009 (see refs)

My little branch of geography is called "political ecology"  This subfield attempts to figure out the connection between social, economic, and political processes and on the ground change.  Political ecologists are generally skeptical of simple answers to environmental problems.  For example, around here the common explanation for why people encroach into the national park, or why they illegally cut down trees, is that they are hungry.  I call this the "imperative of the stomach".  But if we see this as a problem that needs to be addressed, we need to think about why people are hungry, and why are they pushed into difficult situations.  One of the main questions political ecologists ask is how processes operating at different scales interact to produce outcomes on the ground.  By "scale" I mean basically how big a lens we use to look at what's happening.  We can see a problem from the global perspective, the national perspective, the regional perspective, the local, and even the individual viewpoint.  And often the picture that is revealed at these different scales is different.

So back to the farmers at Pesisir Bukit and Pauh Tinggi.  The people I talked to said the local folks are locked into a specific pattern because they need to make money to eat.  From the global perspective that pattern is a problem because it leads to the destruction of resources that are considered important at a global scale (trees and biodiversity).  At the national level it's a problem because the local farmers encroach into an area that the national government has decided should be set aside.  So the priorities of the global and national scale are expressed in the policies of the park, which prohibit farmers from moving in (2).  However, if we look at the regional scale, the rules that keep people from farming in the park are more of a political issue.  The leaders of the district say that the park is bad for people because it keeps them from making a living, and it also keeps the district from making money from things like plantations and production forests, which they could tax.  The district headman has been very vocal about this; he often says that "the world cries out for us to protect the 'lungs of the earth', but they don't care about the lungs of the people of Kerinci'" ("Dunia berkoar-koar mengatakan TNKS paru-paru dunia, tapi mereka tidak memperhatikan paru-paru masyarakat Kerinci").  This has been a very effective strategy for the district headman because he has been able to portray the park as a common enemy, and so people in the district support him (3).

New houses in Desa Harapan Jaya; Rawa Bento
swamp (trees) and Gunung (Mt.) Kerinci in background

Then in the middle we have the farmers, who are operating under local, rather than regional, national, or global conditions.  They are caught in the middle; while the park says that they can't farm within the borders, the district government, on the surface, at least, supports them.  However the district government hasn't offered any strategies to help the farmers, either by offering them land someplace else or helping them find new livelihoods.  One of the village heads complains that the district government has failed to provide funds for a middle school, which he sees as a key tool in improving the opportunities available to the youth in the village.  In fact there isn't very much real support at all for the farmers on the part of the regional government, and some folks told me that they don't feel like anyone, not the regional government and not the national government, supports them.  In short, they are all alone.

This is important because is creates a kind of trap for the farmers.  Because they don't seem to have any options they continue to do what they are doing.  But the conflict between the park and the district government has some important consequences for the farmers at the local scale.  For one, as I mentioned in the previous post, the farmers don't have any formal title of ownership over their land.  Rather it is governed by an adat (traditional law) system.  Land transactions and conflicts are regulated rather harmoniously under this system, but there's a big defect.  The farmers can never be absolutely certain that they will have access to the land in the distant future.  Since they have no legal protections, they could be evicted next year, next month, next week, or even tomorrow (4).  So instead of buying and selling land, they have a system they call ganti rugi.  If you are in the village and you want to secure some land to cultivate, you don't buy it.  Rather you pay the person that currently owns it compensation for the work they did to open up the land in the first place.  But since there is always uncertainty, securing the rights to the land always carries the risk that the government will come in and kick you off.  Thus the future value of the land is a lot lower than it otherwise would be if the farmers had clear title to it.  This changes their long term calculations and affects how they use the land.  In this situation it makes a lot of sense economically to clear land, cultivate on it a couple of years, flip it, and start the whole process over again.

Of course this has implications for conservation at the park.  It encourages "unsustainable" agricultural practices, as the farmers in the area have neither reason or capacity to adapt less-damaging agricultural systems.  And it effectively prevents the farmers from making investments in the land that would lead to long-term increases in productivity.  No one really benefits from the situation except for the people exploiting it for  political gain.  For their part the people managing the park sympathize with the farmers, though their primary responsibility is to enforce the law.  They have made some efforts to help farmers with alternative livelihoods, providing villagers with ducks to reduce their reliance on the land in the park, but villagers complain that these small-scale programs come nowhere close to compensating them for the loss of land.

I don't know how to solve this problem, but now I have a good idea of the processes driving the encroachment.  Knowing about the social, economic, and political contexts surrounding environmentally destructive behavior helps us to understand what sorts of interventions definitely will not work, and points us in the direction of addressing causes rather than symptoms.

Notes

(1)  I hate to say "I told you so", but I told you so.

(2)  It should also be noted that although encroachment is against the law, the national park does not have the resources to enforce the law, which complicates the picture still further.

(3)  I would say the bupati uses this to distract attention from other issues.

(4)  The park has tried to evict encroaching farmers in the past; most recently in 2010 the park had an agreement with the district headman to expel the villagers, but the headman backed out and no action was taken.

References

Wilson, Geoff A.  2009.  The Spatiality of Multifunctional Agriculture: A Human Geography Perspective.  Geoforum 40:2 pp269-280.