On World Environment Day, June 5, Indonesian farmers continue their fight against deforestation and palm oil giants. 

The destruction of tropical forests increased by 150% in March during the Covid-19 outbreak, WWF announced in a statement for World Environment Day on 5 June. Indonesia’s forests paid the heaviest price with a loss of 130,000 hectares. And indigenous people are on the front line in the fight against deforestation. Their ancestral territory covers 40 million hectares of forest, nearly half of the world’s remaining virgin forest cover. This means that the future of Indonesia’s green lung, so precious to the planet, may be in their hands.

But today, Indonesia is above all the world’s leading producer and exporter of palm oil. As a result, the world’s third largest rainforest is even more threatened than the Amazon. It lost 24 million hectares between 2001 and 2017, an area equivalent to that of the United Kingdom, and every minute an area the size of six football pitches is cleared. The giants of palm oil and rubber, the food industry, the pulp and paper industry and agrofuels are all under fire.

And across the country, the first victims are Native communities, 170 million people. In particular, those who live in the forest. Yet a 2012 decree specifies that their forests are subject to customary law and a bill to protect the peoples and their habitat has been under consideration since 2018. But no official mapping of Indonesia or its forests has been done since independence in 1945. This vagueness plays into the hands of companies that violate the land rights of indigenous people and those who have migrated to virgin Indonesian territories. 

Towards an ecological agricultural revolution

So, together, farmers are fighting and they imagine new agricultural models inspired by traditional Aboriginal knowledge. The village of Piondo, in the Toili district, has become the epicentre of resistance. For the past 10 years, farmers have been fighting together against a palm oil company.

In 2011, when it tried to settle on their land. The farmers called upon Eva Bande as the mediator. Sentenced to four years in prison after a peaceful demonstration, she became the palm oil rebel. And today, she continues her fight. For her, agroecology is not only “a response to the extractive industries”, but also “a form of struggle for human rights and nature”.

Alongside him, the peasants are demanding certificates of customary land rights and are proposing a new model of ecological agriculture based on their ancestral knowledge as part of the state’s agrarian reform programmes. They have reintroduced market gardening, organic rice, turmeric and ginger, which is now marketed throughout the district. Only organic produce to counter the oil palm trees.

Find the portrait of Eva Bande on The Voice of native women.

Photo : Emlington

Océane Segura