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.