The survival of one of Java’s last remaining biologically rich natural forests will depend as much on promoting community stewardship as it does on government conservation programmes, say scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) working in the Indonesian archipelago.

Java’s largest remaining block of natural forest, a reserve area of some 700 km2 in the Gunung Halimun National Park and surrounding areas, is considered crucial to safeguarding drinking water supplies in nearby Jakarta. The area is under intense pressure from the combined effects of population growth and efforts to use the land for farming and government tree planting.

“The well-being of the Park’s protected areas or bio-reserves depends on the ability of local farmers to make use of statemanaged production forests that surround the Park,” says Meine van Noordwijk, the World Agroforestry Centre’s Regional Coordinator – Southeast Asia.

He feels research has demonstrated that supporting local people to plant fruit and other productive tree species in areas designated as production forests can provide the incentives villagers lost when their access to these lands was taken by the Indonesian Government in the 1970s. “Before the Suharto era, the area’s production forests were managed reasonably well by local people. If you look carefully, you can see where they planted tea, coffee and fruit trees,” he says.

But, van Noordwijk fears that if steps are not taken soon to help farmers increase productivity in areas designated as production forest, and to provide legal access to the land so that they have an incentive to plant fruit trees and timber, it’s unlikely that the Park’s forest reserves can be maintained.

“Population pressure in Java is simply too great,” he says. “Something needs to be done to give people an incentive to protect the reserve.

Incentives that lead to good stewardship,” van Noordwijk adds, “are most likely to result from systematic negotiations between local communities, park managers, and local government. ICRAF,” he notes, “is working with a variety of partners to identify the social and biophysical causes of conflicts arising over the Park’s land tenure policies.”

Non-native pine forests

Officials from the international NGO Forest Watch International and the Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment who work closely with ICRAF think that the situation is extremely fluid.

Pine tree plantations planted during the Suharto era were recently transferred to Park jurisdiction. These plantations not only displaced native species, but are now being cut down by local people, including employees of the State Forest Company, to clear space for food crops. It only a matter of time, they say, before people start moving into the forest reserve.

Marcotting to propagate valuable tree species

“There are a number of things that can be done to reverse that situation, however,” says Tree Domestication Specialist James Roshetko. “The first is to develop extension methods and technologies that will help farmers improve the productivity of both naturalised and indigenous tree species. The second is to demonstrate how better management of trees translates into cash.”

Roshetko, who holds a joint appointment with the World Agroforestry Centre and Winrock International, is testing extension methods in a project with farmers in Nangung, a sub-district of 15,000 households that borders directly on the Park’s southern boundary.

“Farmers in Nangung say they don’t manage their trees because they lack markets,” Roshetko says, a notion seconded by Pak Kusnadi, a farm leader who teaches agroforestry to local primary school students.

Kusnadi believes that local children, most of whose families live below Indonesia’s official poverty line, will need to do a better job of managing trees than their parents if they are going to increase their standard of living and protect the Park reserve areas.

The project which is financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) includes training for farm leaders and NGO staff, identification of priority tree species, development of management practices that boost profits, and rapid market appraisals.

“We look at the commodity chain all the way from production to the consumer,” Roshetko says. “The objective is help farmers understand the demands of the market, avoid its pitfalls, and capitalise on its strengths.”

For example, Roshetko and his colleagues are helping Pak Kusnadi’s group develop strategies that maximise longterm profits. One group of Nanung farmers he notes, recently replaced lessproductive spice trees with tropical fruit trees that fetch high prices in Jakarta markets.

“It will be 8 years before the new trees produce,” Kusnatei says, but the farmers are willing to make the investment because they’re beginning to think about the future. “It’s long-term thinking”, he adds, “that will save the forest”.

Deal halts evictions

Questions remain, however, as to who has the right to develop the Park’s production forests. Farmers claim that they are the traditional stewards of the land and had access before the Suharto regime came to power, but were never given official title. But government foresters are skeptical of the farmers’ claims and are unsure if local communities can actually care for the land.

“Our intention is that local communities will soon have legal access to the land and an incentive to contribute to its well-being, “says ICRAF Senior Forest Policy Analyst/Governance Expert in Southeast Asia Chip Fay.“What we’ve learned is that the interests of local people and the government’s need to maintain the integrity of water catchments frequently coincide.”

Discussing tree propagation techniques with Indonesian farmers

Fay, an expert in what is called ‘negotiation support,’ helps equip local communities to find common ground with powerful government agencies. For example, in the late 1990s, in Lampung Province in southern Sumatra, Fay and his colleagues helped broker an agreement that halted evictions and provided 750 families with legal access to forest production zones. The only proviso was that the farmers should plant trees that stabilise the soil and cease growing annual food crops that lead to soil erosion.

Gamal Pasya, an Indonesian Natural Resources Policy Analyst, and local government official who works with Fay adds that, “Government agencies often fail to recognise that local people have a strong tradition of caring for the land and are experts at maintaining their holdings.

There are many commonsense practices, traditional systems if you will, that people use to hold the soil in place,” he says. “They may not be sophisticated, but they work and are frequently better than the techniques recommended by government foresters.”

According to Pasya, who worked with local NGOs to broker the deal in Lampung, the first step in crafting an agreement is to create dialogue in order to get the parties to work together. “You have to act as an honest broker to establish trust and you have to base your efforts on the results of research,” he says.

Tending a tree nursery in southern Java

Pasya notes that the Lampung agreement provided farmers with permission to use the land but stopped short of granting actual title, since, in this case the farmers themselves recognised that they were migrants to the area and did not claim traditional rights. Even before the Suharto era, he says, farmers lacked clear title and recognised that they must act as stewards of the land rather than as property owners.“That’s the basis of the deal between the community and the Government.”

Fay adds that 15 similar efforts are now in progress and that he and his colleagues hope to reduce the time required to broker an agreement from the 18 months required for the Lampung settlement, to just 2 or 3 months.

“Right now we’re collaborating with the Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment to document the history of the land in the Halimun reserve and to reassure Park officials that tree farming is not going to have an adverse affect on the water catchment.”

Park managers, he notes, are most concerned about the planting of fruit trees in protected areas where ‘exotic species’ are prohibited. “This is a land-use restriction that seriously reduces a farmer’s economic options. Our role is to help the Park’s managers define the meaning of the term exotic species and to demonstrate that many socalled exotics were integrated into the local ecosystem long ago and thus pose little threat to biodiversity or the environment, but do offer economic returns for local people.

Local people, he says, are being encouraged, to specify the conservation methods they will use to protect the land and are asking that their areas be designated as ‘conservation villages’. In return for that special classification, the farmers promise not to expand their holdings into natural forest conservation areas and to prevent unauthorised cutting in the forest reserve. “The end result,” Fay says, “is that local communities will have a vested interest in increasing tree cover on the land and in acting as protectors of the forest.”

Indonesian forests in decline

“The need to deepen the science of negotiation support and to scale-up its application is extremely urgent,” adds Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre. Garrity, who spent more than a decade working in Indonesia, notes that Indonesian and World Bank officials recently reported that the health of the country’s forests was far worse than previously thought and that if deforestation continues at current rates, Indonesia will cease to be a major supplier of wood products.

“Perhaps more alarming”, he says,” are figures that indicate few of the country’s conservation areas will remain intact. What we’re seeing is the rapid demise of forests that once covered 160 million km2 of the Indonesia archipelago.

The need to find better means of protecting such natural forests and helping communities to make the most effective use of their production forests has never been more important."