Devi Asmarani, Indonesia Correspondent.

IN CENTRAL KALIMANTAN

Straits Times Indonesia Correspondent Devi Asmarani and Executive Photographer Desmond Wee spent three days in Central Kalimantan and learnt how precious forests were destroyed in thoughtless ways. This is Devi's blog from the the trip.

28 May, 2007

The heat was the first thing to hit me as I stepped off the airplane onto the tarmac of the Tjilik Riwut airport in Palangkaraya, the capital of Central Kalimantan.

This was my first time in this town, but the unforgiving heat brought with it a surge of familiarity.

Thirty years ago I arrived on the eastern tip of Kalimantan with my family, settling in at the river town of Samarinda, where my dad would be stationed for the next three-and-half years.

'This whole town was built on peat swamp that had been drained off,' said Nordin, an environmental activist who would be our guide for the next three days.

He took us first to the infamous 'One Million Hectare Mega Rice Project', about an hour's drive from Palangkaraya.

It was an ambitious project under then president Suharto, aimed at providing land and livelihood for families from the densely populated Java and Bali islands under the transmigration scheme.

They would move into pockets of settlements there, where they were given land to farm. Mr Suharto targeted at boosting domestic supply of rice with the project, achieving what he called self-sufficiency.

In 1996, the government began to clear 1.4 million hectare of peat forests for the project that covered three Kalimantan provinces.

The vast area was divided into blocks of land bordered with man-made canals built to drain the wetland.

The project was destined to flop, as had been predicted by many experts.

Peat moss has a character of a sponge. It retains water, but when drained at such massive scales, it becomes dry and acidic, rendering soil useless for agriculture. Not only that, as the forest dried out, the fires began.

Residents in nearby villages I interviewed said they began to experience big-scale forest fires from the mega hectare project area during the El Nino drought season.

The project was abandoned after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. By then there were already 13,000 families who had participated in the transmigration scheme.

Left with no government support and vulnerable to the floods and drought season, they scattered. Some had better luck in other towns and villages, becoming labourers at plantations, some worked in illegal logging operations or became food peddlers.

Over the next three days that we spent in the interior of Central Kalimantan, other evidence of thoughtless attempts by men to tame nature continued to unfold in many different ways.

May 29, 2007

We were driving on the southern axis of the Trans-Kalimantan road, passing through Sampit, the site of gruesome race riots between the Dayak natives and Madurese migrants several years back.

This road split through peat land, which makes up 20 per cent of Central Kalimantan.

That is why the province is prone to severe bush and forest fires as there is nothing more inflammable than dried out peat moss.

Along the way, we passed areas that were the site of forest burning in 1997. Some areas are interspersed with trees and bushes, but they will never return to their former shape, becoming secondary forest areas.

We stopped at a field that looked freshly burned. The soft moss underneath was covered with thick ashes and black soot. Felled trees littered the land and smoke wafted from several spots on the ground, though there was no flame in sight.

This is fire on peat land. Even when the flame dies out, the smoke can last for days until the rain puts it out, making fire fighting an impossible task sometimes.

During the dry season, fire would spread further and last for days on end.

Nordin predicted this field was owned and burned by small holders because it was done in smaller patches and looked more controlled.

When planting season begins, this land would likely be planted with rubber trees, one of the most common agro commodities preferred by locals, he added.

We passed a thriving little village of Kereng Pangi that has seen a surge in residents in the past 15 years. It is a gold town.

People have come from all over Kalimantan, and even from Java and Sumatra to try their luck at mining gold.

They use a simple engine to pump water to soften up the ground until the earth caves in. Using a makeshift dredger they sieved the soil for gold sands.

At one site we visited, there were four large cavities - one that looked as though work was still going on and three others pretty much abandoned.

The sludge waste from the mine seeps into the ground, flowing into a man-made stream, and eventually making its way to the river nearby.

Once a healthy rainforest before loggers stripped it of its trees, about 6,000 illegal mine sites now dot the parched land like mini deserts.

But if gold is in, logging doesn't seem to be.

Pundu used to thrive as a logging village, with most of its residents work in logging operations - legal or illegal.

In is slowly dying in the past two years, as illegal operations appear to be slowing down following the government's crackdown.

After about six hours drive, we left the main road to enter oil palm plantation area.

Several times Nordin navigated the car through dangerously the flooded road; and each time we held our breath until we reached the other side.

Deforestation has made much of Kalimantan prone to floods.

We entered a gate of a plantation owned by a Malaysian company, and all of the sudden we were in oil palm world, everywhere we turned it was nothing but young oil palm trees.

Two-years old palm trees were lined in precise distance from one another, but one thing bothered us: why were there so many piles of burned logs strewn across the plantation?

These are big logs, some with about 50 cm diameter. Couldn't they be used for better things rather than being left to rot here?

But Nordin said, these logs are less valuable than the ones that are already taken out by companies licensed to clear the land.

We stopped at a workers quarter and talked to a group of young men who travelled thousands of kilometres away from the island of Flores in Eastern Indonesia to find a better life here.

'There's no job to be found in my hometown,' said one of them.

May 30, 2007

We stayed the last night a the house of Hajji Syahroni, a respected businessman who used to be the village chief.

Sembuluh is a cozy little village by a huge lake, about an hour's drive from the plantation area, where 30 per cent of the people now work for the plantations.

I took a walk outside and stopped to chat with some women whose husband worked for the plantations.

They used to work in logging operations, the women said, and made twice sometimes thrice the money they do now.

'But we have no choice,' said one of them. 'There's no other job.'

I asked them if the smoke bothered them when the forests were being cleared for the plantation.

'We kept our windows and doors all shut and our kids inside on those days,' said one of them.

We stopped Mr. Warjian. He lives in a small hut tending his vegetable gardens surrounded by thousands of hectares of oil palm plantations.

Half farmer, half activist, he is literally a lone ranger.

When other villagers had let go of their land to the plantation companies for some compensation, he jealously guarded his 100 ha plot, parts of which he only begins to clear to plant rubber trees.

He does this so that one day his offspring will still be entitled to a land, he said.

He also keeps a wooded area nearby from the plantation people to protect the resident animals - the monkeys, the orang utan and the birds.

He had been offered money and at times threatened to give up the land, but he toughs it out.

'If we don't protect what we have, everyone of us, our future generations included, will be labours on our own land forever,' he said.

For a man who has only studied up to third grade, he couldn't have put it any better.