Alternative trade: Aiming at fair share of Balinese crafts

By Anna Lucas

DENPASAR (JP): Made Muluh used to be a rice farmer. He learned to carve wooden statues from his father, who was also a rice farmer whose skills were called on from time to time to make wooden icons for shrines and temples in his hometown of Tegalalang.

In the early '80s, in need of extra cash to meet increasing community demands for ritual donations, Muluh mortgaged 70 acres of land to establish a business in the booming handicraft trade.

It was clear to Muluh that it was the flocks of tourists, not the muddy sawah, that was the answer to his never ending series of fiscal crises.

But somehow, Made Muluh miscalculated. By the following year, he found himself unable to pay the bank, and was in greater debt than he could ever have imagined.

Faced with the prospect of selling his land to developers or declaring bankruptcy, Muluh breathed a sigh of relief when Mitra Bali, the island's sole alternative trade organization, stepped in.

"What we offered to Muluh was simply a soft loan," explains Mitra Bali founder and frontman, Agung Alit.

"So now, instead of being indebted to the bank, he makes repayments to Mitra Bali at a much lower rate," Agung said. In return, Mitra Bali gets use of the land until the loan is paid off.

"The idea from the beginning was to use the land for some kind of income generating activity that would benefit the local community of craftspeople," he continued.

Agung said Mitra Bali initially thought of building some kind of tourist accommodation.

"But then I realized that this was a great opportunity, and a much better example to the local community, if we could give something back supporting the environment," he said.

So they settled on using the land for a regreening project -- "planting fast growing timbers that can be used by woodcarvers".

But not many of Made Muluh's neighbors in the Tegalalang handicraft district have been as lucky as he was.

At the root of the problem is the drastic and rapid pace of change.

Guide book

Tourism can transform a community's economy almost overnight. In Tegalalang, locals looked to be at a loss as to how to tackle the cash pouring in.

It was between the pages of tourist guide books that this area, once known as a "rice-bowl," was reconstructed to become Bali's "handicraft center". Since the early '80s locals have seen an increasing number of souvenir-seeking tourists.

Not surprisingly, many locals, to whom woodcarving skills had been passed down from elders as temple art, left the sawah for the roadside shopfront.

In the rush to be part of the world of commerce, the new handicraft business people found themselves adopting systems of economic management that worked for them as rice farmers, but which were much more difficult to apply to their new endeavors.

Agung Alit became aware of this reality when he was working with a national level alternative trade organization, Pekerti.

"After two years of doing rounds of wood carver families..(and)..being involved in their community activities, I saw a pattern of problems and obstacles emerge," he said.

He could see why the craftspeople were dependent on the middlemen who did the buying for mega-art shops.

"Not only were they dependent on the art shops for marketing and promotion, but most had no basic book-keeping system, and thus nothing to refer to in setting prices."

By 1993 Agung Alit had established Mitra Bali as the first Bali-based alternative trade organization, whose "main motive is not profit, but rather to ensure that local producers, artisans and craftspeople, feel some of the benefits of industry expansion," he explained.

Kicking off with a healthy fiscal injection from the United Nations-sponsored People to People project, and British-based aid organization Oxfam, Mitra Bali set about organizing woodcarver family units in Tegalalang.

A system of ordering, production, packaging, transporting and marketing was set up to ensure maximum market accessibility to the producer.

In addition to its system of fair trade -- which includes an unprecedented 50 percent deposit on all orders -- Mitra Bali also initiates programs to tackle the problem at its roots.

Training sessions in subjects such as book-keeping, design, marketing and promotion, are held regularly.

At the sessions held in Silungan, near Ubud, around 20 craftspeople, all men, were busy transforming their sketches into small statues in wood.

Competition

Sue Harrison and Retno Winahyu, of Oxfam's Product Development Division, offer advice and suggestions to the carvers.

"...craftspeople really need to be coming up with new, original designs to be able to survive," explains Winahyu.

She said Oxfam, the biggest buyer of the crafts, decided such training was needed for two reasons: so that producers could be one step ahead of competitors in actively creating new products, and to give them an idea of marketable designs.

At this session, participants were learning about the finer marketable points of cat figures, a trend in Britain.

Much of Oxfam's 'fair trade' products -- handicrafts from all over the Third World, are sold via mail-order catalogs.

Oxfam's criteria for products to achieve fair trade status are: 'no exploitation of child labor and women, healthy working conditions, and use of environmentally friendly materials.'

"Consumers in (Britain) are increasingly aware of Fair Trade issues, and they are willing to pay a bit more for Fair Trade products," claims Winahyu, adding price and quality remained main considerations.

Resident Nyoman Mudhita is crouched over a figure of a wooden cat, into which he cuts a Cheshire grin and eyes as round as a Barong.

The Foundation places orders with him to supply buyers -- mostly alternative trade organizations themselves -- in Canada, Japan, the United States and the UK.

A woodcarver all his life, like his father, Mudhita only recently opened a shop front in Tegalalang. His first order from Mitra Bali, he said, was his most successful to date.

The reasons, he said, were: "First, Mitra Bali places 50 percent deposit on all orders. No other buyers I know of do this, so craftspeople are usually forced into a situation where they have to borrow money to finance the order."

"Second, Mitra Bali guarantees not to leak original designs to other craftspeople who might be able to produce them at a cheaper price."

He said one of the biggest challenges craftspeople face is that of design stealing -- often by art shops.

While copyright laws do exist in Indonesia to protect original designs, taking such claims to the courts is beyond the means of most woodcarvers.

But is a single foundation capable of ensuring that local artisans get a fair go? One reason to be hesitant about embracing alternative trade as 'the answer' is the ominously impending free trade agenda of recently formed multilateral bodies such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

Industrialized

Agung Alit says they were already feeling the impact of competition from Bangladesh, Nepal and India, "where woodcarvings can be produced much cheaper than in Bali".

Moreover, he says what is now a mainly home-based, family unit industry could end up being completely industrialized to up production and cut labor costs.

This could mean the forcing of artisans from their backyard rural workshops into huge handicraft assembly lines in Jakarta's urban sprawl.

But due to a gubernatorial decree by which their Bali branches are required to buy locally, Balinese artisans say they are yet to feel the impact of this nascent industrialization process.