Rural Kalimantan, where rice is worth more than gold

Rural Kalimantan, where rice is worth more than gold

By Iskandar Zulkarnaen

SAMARINDA, East Kalimantan (Antara): Morning's dewdrops began to wet the earth, and the Kalian River in the Mahakam hinterland of East Kalimantan ran numbingly cold. Yet it did nothing to deter an old woman from stepping into the muddy water in search of grains of gold.

From dawn to dusk, Ati, armed with only a wooden winnowing tray, trudges through the mud to make both ends meet. She has done this for the past 10 months since a withering and persistent drought in the province destroyed her crops.

Old she may be, but her arms, darkened with wrinkled skin, can still dexterously shake the winnowing tray, a traditional means of gold panning.

"I'm now 65 years old and sickly," said the woman, born on Buton island in Southeast Sulawesi, but a resident of East Kalimantan for the past 50 years.

She leaves for the river early in the morning to find a choice panning site. Arriving a little later would mean having to walk farther upstream for a spot, a crucial loss of precious time.

Ati, widowed 10 years ago, said she had been gold prospecting during the last three months because there was no other means of earning a living.

"During the dry season between June and December 1997, we could survive by growing vegetables and secondary crops although our rice harvest failed," she said.

Unfortunately, the dry season dragged on, parching and cracking farmland, and simultaneously dashing people's hopes of ever earning a consistent living from agriculture.

"Grass has dried up in many places, let alone vegetables. Forests have gone up in flames. There is nothing left for us," she said.

The drought in early 1997 proceeded well into last month, making it the worst in the province in the last 15 years. People can no longer farm the barren land.

Many farmers now suddenly find themselves working as gold prospectors, gathering on average of 100 milligrams of the metal daily, a quantity that a Samarinda trader would buy for about Rp 4,000.

"In fact, we prefer to exchange the gold for rice or sugar because we would have to pay quite a lot in transportation fees to buy these goods in the market," she said.

In the Long Iram, Melak, Muara Ancalong and Long Bagun subdistricts, rice cost an average of Rp 2,000 to Rp 2,500/kg, sugar Rp 2,500/kg and kerosene Rp 700/bottle late last month.

Ati's misfortune is also shared by hundreds of families living around the Kalian and Babi rivers, most of whom, having experienced a harvest failure for two consecutive years, have now also taken up gold prospecting.

Their activities are acceptable to PT Kalian Equatorial Mining (KEM), a gold-mining company in the Kalian River area with majority shares controlled by an Australian investor, as long as they do not resort to the "spraying" system as this is environmentally damaging.

Things were not always so harmonious between the company and residents. In 1993, 600 people demonstrated against land appropriation and evictions of local gold prospectors by KEM without compensation.

In January last year, local representatives demanded through the National Commission on Human Rights that companies like KEM stop preventing people from searching for gold along the Kelian River. It appears some type of agreement has been achieved.

Dozens of other subdistricts in the Kutai hinterland are also experiencing difficulties, said Leding Mering, chairman of the East Kalimantan Dayak Association.

Prompted by the rice harvest failure, many locals are now gold prospecting in Busang River, some 600 km to the west of Samarinda.

Indeed, the Dayaks, who live at one with life in surrounding forests, do not fully depend on agricultural land. They can sell rattan, resin, birds' nests and eaglewood.

But the province's forests, the largest in Indonesia after Irian Jaya, have been severely damaged due to fires.

Data compiled at the command center for forest and land fire management reveals that between January and April of this year areas which went up in flames measured 400,000 hectares, inflicting losses of about Rp 7.5 trillion, mainly in the timber sector.

These fires have obviously exerted a serious impact on locals. "It is difficult to find rattan, resin, birds' nests or eaglewood now because much of the forest has been damaged," said Lesan, 41, of Muara Pahu subdistrict.

Although the price of rattan is beginning to increase as a result of liberalization in the trading of rattan as stipulated in the agreement between Indonesia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), locals in the hinterland, unfortunately, have yet to benefit from this favorable situation.

"While it is difficult to find rattan now, the price is tending to decrease, from Rp 1,000/kg to Rp 300/kg," he said.

Rice

Prices of basic commodities have soared as a result of the monetary crisis. High costs of transportation have made matters worse because the drought has left rivers, vital to transportation in East Kalimantan, much shallower.

The provincial administration and a number of parties, including the Indonesian Forestry Society and Rio Tinto Foundation, have provided hundreds of tons of rice in aid in effort to overcome the problem.

Kutai district administration and the East Kalimantan logistics agency (Dolog) have also made available 500 tons of rice.

However, the shallowing of rivers has catapulted the cost of river transportation to a level higher than the price of rice. Dolog rice, for example, costs Rp 925/kg, but the transportation cost is Rp 1,500/kg.

In some cases, the rice can be transported only up to Bangun town. To reach a number of subdistricts such as Muara Pahu, Melak and Long Pahangai, a small boat called ketinting, only capable of carrying 1 ton of rice at a time, has to be used because of the river's shallowness.

According to the data compiled by the local food crop and horticultural agricultural service, the 1998 dry season has led to the worst ever drought in East Kalimantan, parching 80 percent of agricultural land equivalent to 84,000 hectares.

Data from the social affairs bureau of East Kalimantan regional secretariat appears to indicate that 55,500 people have been hit by starvation and that 10 months of drought have made thousands of families lose their expected harvests.

However, the East Kalimantan provincial administration has denied the starvation reports.

"No East Kalimantan resident is suffering from a food shortage. The fact is some of them are vulnerable to a food shortage," the province's governor, HM Ardans, has emphasized.

He said the data was not about famine but estimates of people vulnerable to food shortages in the future.