Parched Land

Long before the media latched on to the hot topic of impending global climate change, most farmers in Indonesia were already trying to cope with its effects on their way of life. Bhimanto Suwastoyo reports.

Agriculture is the livelihood of more than 60 percent of the country’s 230 million people, and farming communities are counting the costs from changes in water and soil moisture in recent years due to global warming-linked changes.

"This phenomenon of climate changes has already been really felt by many of our farmers in the past few years," said Usman Hasan, deputy executive director of the Indonesian Farmers Association.

He said that drought, as well as later-than-usual, abbreviated but more intensive rainy seasons, accompanied by storms and flooding, have become an annual bane of farmers.

 "Seasons can no longer be expected to come and end on time. They are now chaotic," he said.

Planting season arrives late, extended rains cause rotting of paddy, resulting in reduced harvests. At the other extreme, the onset of the rainy season is later, leaving crops vulnerable to disease and fire.  

In the future, experts also warn that rising sea levels will cause the inundation of many traditional rice production centers on the northern coast of Java.

But farmers, used to the vagaries of the weather, have been quick to adapt, Usman said. They are choosing drought-resistant seedlings, changing the crops grown between rice plantings to more durable types and, in the most drastic measure, changing their traditional crops altogether.

"The main impacts of climate changes on agriculture are in the growing scarcity of water and in the heat brought by long dry periods," said Didiek Hadjar Goenadi, the executive director of the Bogor-based Indonesian Plantation Research Institute.

 "And our farmers have already had to face those problems for a few years now. Farmers in Indonesia and in other developing countries should be prepared to face the threats posed by climate change.”

Eko Widyarmanto, an agriculture counselor working on the fertile southwestern slopes of Mount Merapi in Central Java, said local farmers were using their own methods to adjust to increasingly scarce water resources and longer dry seasons.

"They have begun planting water-retaining plants, such as the Aren palm, in water catchment areas and also are turning to more water-conserving planting techniques," said Eko, who works with the Magelang district's agriculture office.

Achyar Saepullah, an agriculture manpower resource developer with the district administration in Purwakarta, West Java, said that farmers working nonirrigated land, which still accounts for the bulk of farmed land in the district, were the first to experience the impact of climate change.

"Oh, the farmers know alright [about it]. A delay in planting, no matter how small, deeply affects their timetable and also their cash flow," he said of the effects from later harvests.

"One way for them to face planting delays is to work together in groups. They must

grow the seedlings faster and accelerate their planting to make up for lost time. They also have to work in groups to be able to better share the increasingly dwindling water resources for their crops.”

Both he and his counterpart in the neighboring district of Cianjur, Ahmad Husen, believe that farmers are able to deal with the effects of global warming for now.

“I don’t see any problems that the farmers cannot handle," Ahmad said. If farmers need pumps to relay water to their nonirrigated fields in times of drought, the government will lend them the equipment, he added.

There also are plenty of drought-resistant varieties of rice to revert to, he added.

Didiek was more pessimistic.

"They (farmers) can face the effects of climate change at present, mostly because it is merely a question of survival. You plant nothing, you get nothing to eat.”

It us the government's responsibility to assist farmers, he added.

"Without facilities from the government, farmers will not be able to face the impact of climate changes and this will in turn have an impact on national rice production.”

Besides providing farmers with weather forecasts, the government should also familiarize them with crop varieties more suitable to the changing climate, or introduce them to newer farming practices.

Mohammad Jafar Habsah, a former director general for food crops who now heads the Indonesian Association of Agriculture Counselors, also said the government should provide sufficient information for farmers to enable them to react adequately to the changes.

"So far the government's role has been negligible. It should be helping to build the capacity of farmers in addressing the problem by providing more access to more accurate weather reports, for example.”

He believed that while the government, especially at the higher levels, was "quite aware" of the effects of climate change on agriculture and farmers, "the capacity to anticipate things at the lower levels is far from adequate".

Didiek noted that while the research sector was looking into various ways to deal with climate changes, especially for farmers, no policies had been made.

Achyar and Ahmad, both working at the government level, confirmed there was no directive to promote more drought-resistant strains of rice or other crops, even though there were ample stocks of those strains.

Didiek  also said there was no policy in place on assisting farmers who suffered harvest failures caused by climate change.  At the most free seeds are distributed, but nothing is done to cover the losses or help the farmers until a new harvest.

The only region in Indonesia where the threat of climate change carries less urgency is  Bali, where irrigated land is the norm and where traditional irrigation management associations, called "Subak", are active, he said.

 "Elsewhere, farmers are vulnerable, and the government should help prepare them to face the problems," he added.

Is it too late for the government to act and begin to set down policies and address the problem at the grassroots level?

“Better late than never,” Didiek answered.

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