Honey hunters give Lore Lindu National Park a helping hand
Honey hunters give Lore Lindu National Park a helping hand
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) international conservation
recently invited freelance journalist Richard Smithers for a 10-
day visit to get a closer look at the micro-enterprise
development scheme in Central Sulawesi's Lore Lindu National
Park. The two following reports were written exclusively for The
Jakarta Post.
PALU, Central Sulawesi (JP): For generations, the Pekurehua
people of Watutau in Central Sulawesi's Napu valley have been
collecting the pure fragrant honey from the forests around Lore
Lindu National Park.
Hunting for the forest delicacy, produced by giant honey bees,
is a community tradition for the Pekurehua. The delicious honey
is a much sought after item on breakfast tables in the nearby
provincial capital of Palu.
Under these circumstances, honey sales should have been
contributing valuable income to the village. But inefficient
production and poor marketing kept prices low. A 600 milliliter
bottle of top grade forest honey was bringing villagers a mere Rp
1,000 (worth about Rp 5,000 today). Middlemen were enjoying the
greatest profits.
But today, the honey business in Watutau is flourishing. The
price is up, demand is strong and revenue is flowing into the
village. What is more, the villagers have a financial and
cultural incentive to protect the threatened forests in which the
bees make their homes.
Why the change in fortune for the Watutau honey hunters? The
villagers -- and the forests -- are benefiting from an innovative
microenterprise development scheme run by an international
conservation agency, The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
Working with the Lore Lindu National Park management and local
environmental groups, TNC ran workshops on how to smoke out the
bees without building huge bonfires. The bonfires posed the
threat of forest fires, were inefficient and left a black residue
in the honey, reducing its quality.
Lumentut, who is the manager of the Watutau honey cooperative,
said the bees were producing more honey following the switch to
portable smokers made of bamboo and leaves.
TNC and its partners also helped the Watutau residents with
marketing. The low price of the honey was because villagers
needed immediate payment to buy food or pay debts. This put them
under pressure to sell quickly. Plus, the middlemen kept prices
low by negotiating separately with individual villagers.
TNC provided a revolving honey fund which pays villagers a set
price. The fund sells to consumers under the Madu Piore-Bomba
brand name at a healthy Rp 25,000 per bottle.
In three years, the honey enterprise has boosted villagers'
incomes by 12 percent, while the revolving fund has grown from Rp
800,000 to Rp 4,000,000. Villagers still earn most of their
income from farming.
The other beneficiary is the Lore Lindu National Park, which
is under constant threat from agricultural clearing. "Because we
get honey from the forest, we have to protect it," said Lumentut.
Lore Lindu National Park, a United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization "Man and the Biosphere
Reserve", is one of Indonesia's most important biodiversity
refuges. The park's lowland and mountain forests contain more
than 190 species of birds and several unique mammals. According
to Duncan Neville, TNC's project manager for Lore Lindu National
Park, a third of Sulawesi's birds, a quarter of its reptiles and
two-thirds of its mammals occur no where else in the world.
The Watutau villagers have signed a historic agreement with
the National Park management that allows them to gather honey
from the park on a sustainable basis. The villagers designed many
of the regulations governing their access to the park.
"We're trying to develop similar agreements in other villages
based on sustainable enterprises around Lore Lindu," Neville
said. "We need to help local people develop alternatives to
illegal slash-and-burn clearing of the park for coffee and
chocolate plantations."
"The active participation of local community groups in
management of the natural resource base is crucial to the future
preservation of Lore Lindu National Park." An important result of
negotiating the agreement was an improvement in the often frosty
relationship between villagers and National Park management,
Neville said.
Banjar Yulianto Laban, the head of Lore Lindu National Park's
management, says that local communities have a right to stake a
claim on the function of the park, but not on the park land
itself. This would allow access to resources, providing that
biodiversity and the hydrological functions of the park are not
disturbed.
Other microenterprises at various stages of development
include butterfly harvesting, export of traditional bark cloth
(kain kulit kayu) and eco-tourism projects such as rafting the
powerful Lariang River.
The cooperative approach to preserving Lore Lindu is even more
important in Indonesia's current political climate, according to
Neville. He said the devolution of power to local regions had
created a power vacuum in forest protection. "Government agencies
are confused by the change, and the democratic mood gives people
the feeling that the forest can be taken by anyone".
A recent TNC report reveals extensive illegal clearing of the
national park's forests for agriculture near Lake Lindu. It
warned that the clearing is destroying habitat and creating an
agricultural corridor which will isolate a significant section of
the park and provide a permanent base for further habitat
destruction.
Agung Wibowo, Palu field director for the Indonesian Natural
Heritage Foundation (Yayasan Pusaka Alam Nusantara, YPAN), one of
TNC's partners, said national political reform had made it very
difficult to enforce the national park's boundaries.
"The people don't accept the government's map (of the national
park) because they say there was no consultation about the
boundary." This leaves forest advocates scrambling to resolve who
is allowed to farm what land and how. Meanwhile, the forest
clearing continues.
Sulawesi has lost 20 percent of its forest in the last 12
years, much of it illegally, including clearing or timber
removal. Sulawesi also provides 80 percent of the world's rattan
supply for cane furniture, most of which is illegally cut from
protected forests.
The situation is further complicated by severe population
pressure around the national park. Central Sulawesi's population
growth rate is 50 percent higher than the national average and
about half the 120,000 people living in the 117 villages
surrounding the national park are migrants who have arrived since
1980. Many have come via government transmigration programs. The
province, especially the region around the national park, is one
of Indonesia's poorest.
TNC, YPAN and their partners have launched a community mapping
project which involves villagers in resolving where the national
park's boundaries are. They hope this will be supported by a
board to resolve land conflicts and a new scheme for land use
planning around the national park.
Meanwhile, they realize that the future of Lore Lindu National
Park depends on much stronger community support throughout the
province. To achieve this, YPAN's musical puppet show travels to
elementary schools teaching children that, among other things,
preserving the forest will protect their family's clean water
supply.
YPAN and TNC also support the Partnership Forum, a new group
of young environmentalists in Palu. Forum activities include
learning forest ecology and mapping techniques to monitor and
research the national park. Forum members recently ran a
successful publicity campaign to persuade villagers to move out
of a section of the national park they had cleared and occupied.