Mongabay.com-15 Jan 2018
Only one out of nearly 3,000 villages located in Indonesia’s peatlands has received a government permit to manage the forest under the administration’s “social forestry” program. At the same time, 80 percent of peatlands in key areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan fall within plantation and mining concessions. Activists have called on the government to speed up the process of granting permits to villages, arguing that they make better forest stewards than plantation operators. The government has acknowledged the slow pace of progress and accordingly cut its target for the total area of forest reallocated to local communities to a third of the initial figure.
Of the nearly 3,000 villages located within peatlands throughout Indonesia, only one is permitted to manage the forest — a glaring omission that the government has been slow to address through its “social forestry” program.
The program, one of the key policies of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s administration, is based on the understanding that indigenous communities and others who have for generations lived sustainably off the land are the best stewards of these important, carbon-rich ecosystems.
Indonesia’s Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) last year identified some 5,600 square kilometers (2,160 square miles) of peat areas that could potentially be reallocated as village forests. To date, though, only one permit has been issued: to the village of Pematang Rahum in Sumatra’s Jambi province, to manage 10 square kilometers, or less than 4 square miles.
That’s one village out of 2,945 located in peat areas across seven provinces in the country, according to the BRG’s own data.
The failure by the government to grant more social forestry permits is underscored by the urgency of protecting the country’s peatlands, much of which are at risk of being drained and cleared to make way for monoculture plantations and mines.
Eighty percent of peat forests surveyed in four provinces in Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo — Jambi, Riau, South Sumatra and West Kalimantan — fall within such concessions, according to a study by the National Geodata Consortium, a coalition of NGOs.
One village identified in the study, Rawa Mekar Jaya in Riau, lies within 158 square kilometers (61 square miles) of forest, almost all of it peat. But 60 percent of that forest has already been allocated for plantation concessions, said consortium coordinator Rahmat Sulaiman. “So the people have limited space to live.”
Rawa Mekar Jaya is one of the thousands of villages trying to obtain a social forestry permit.
