The American West is having a drought. So, what else is new? And, that’s just the point. The American West has been in an extended drought since 2000, so far the second worst in the last 1200 years. Here is the key quote from the National Geographic article cited above:
In the face of continued climate change, some scientists and others have suggested that using the word “drought” for what’s happening now might no longer be appropriate, because it implies that the water shortages may end. Instead, we might be seeing a fundamental, long-term shift in water availability all over the West.
That is what climate scientists have been warning about all along. The problems we are now experiencing are not just cycles or fluctuations—although those continue to be important—but rather, permanent changes in the climate (that is, on any timeline that matters to humans).
I wrote about this drought when it was only 10 years old. (For a sense of how bad it is now, see the U.S. Drought Monitor.) Back then it did not seem that residents and businesses were taking it seriously, even if some water officials were. There have been ups and downs in the intervening years, but mostly downs.
There is a reason that most major cities are located near water and not in arid regions. Water is heavy, fluid and not easily transported—though vast and expensive water projects do just that. Water cannot be easily created from its constituents elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen is abundant everywhere on Earth. But hydrogen in its elemental state is not readily available and must be extracted from other sources such as natural gas. The cost of manufacturing water is prohibative or we’d likely be doing it already.
That leaves society with two paths: Bring ever greater amounts of water to arid regions which continue to grow in population and water-intensive activities such as farming OR conserve dramatically in order to live within the available water supply.
The second choice appears imminent as water authorities across several states are preparing to activate a drought response plan this summer when Lake Mead (the lake behind Hoover Dam) is expected to reach a level that triggers the plan. All those receiving water from the Colorado River and its tributaries are likely to be affected. Again, a look at the U.S. Drought Monitor demonstrates that the drought extends far beyond the Colorado River basin, west to much of California, east into New Mexico and West Texas and north into parts of Oregon.
There is a third path which I haven’t mentioned because in polite company and official circles it is unmentionable: People could leave. And, they may do so as the costs and consequences of living with less water mount—especially for those in water-intensive pursuits such as agriculture. Those in the cities may leave, too, as the cost of provisioning water for urban areas rises and supplies are curtailed. That would, of course, hit water-intensive businesses and their employees the hardest.
All of this was prophesied long ago by Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, the acknowledged classic treatment of water in the American West. The subtitle of the book is “The American West and Its Disappearing Water.”
Of course, the boosters of growth in the West will tell us that these things are cyclical and that soon the rains will return. But, the West has been waiting for over 20 years. Unfortunately, a positive mental attitude does not trump the physics of climate change—which, in this case, has been combined with a return to what the historical and geological record show is far closer to the norm in the West.
That does not bode well for a people and a culture used to getting its way with nature—something, it turns out, that was really just luck, the luck of having populated and reconfigured the West in a period that was particularly wet in relation to the millennium that preceded it.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights.
Editor’s note: Large scale agriculture, especially the industrial form with its dependence on heavy machinery, highly toxic chemicals and genetically modified crops is incredibly destructive. It’s also remarkably undemocratic since it is pushed by large multinational cooperations and their exclusive institutions like the World Economic Forum and the UN. If we as humans want to have a future on this planet (it looks like we don’t), we need to shift radically to more community based, small scale, democratic food systems and locally applicable techniques for ecological restoration, since large scale agriculture will inevitably fail and leave toxic, deserted landscapes behind.
A battle for the future of food is already underway. There’s still time to change the outcome.
Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.
A Crisis of Participation
But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”
The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”
The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains. “The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”
Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”
Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains how “The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”
The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.
It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”
Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”
Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values: “Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values,” said Kenyangi. “While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”
The Presence of AGRA
The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.
AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).
Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.
Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains, “During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”
“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organisation that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”
Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.
While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.
Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change
This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.
The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?
This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work.
A Growing Culture would like to ask all readers to help raise the dialogue about this upcoming summit. Re-share this article, re-post, tweet and amplify this issue. You can learn more about A Growing Culture here: https://www.agrowingculture.org, on Twitter: @agcconnect or Instagram: @agrowingculture.
The Brazilian government is planning to open up the land of uncontacted tribes to deadly exploitation, by scrapping the emergency orders that currently protect their territories.
Experts say the plan could drive several uncontacted tribes to extinction, and destroy around 1 million hectares of rainforest – an area twice the size of Delaware.
These tribes are especially vulnerable as their territories are not officially mapped out and protected. Currently the only thing standing between them and well-funded and heavily-armed loggers, ranchers and land-grabbers are the orders (known in Brazil as “Restrições de uso” injunctions).
Seven territories are currently protected by these orders, most of which have to be renewed every few years. Three of them are due to expire between September and December 2021, and are particularly vulnerable.
One of these protects the forest home of the last of the Piripkura tribe – after a series of massacres only three members of this tribe are known to exist, though some studies indicate others may still survive in the depths of the forest. A recent study by Brazilian NGO ISA showed that 962 hectares of forest in the Piripkura territory were razed last year, the equivalent of more than 1,000 football pitches.
President Bolsonaro and allies are targeting these tribes’ territories, which remain vulnerable until they are fully demarcated as indigenous lands. A Senator close to Bolsonaro, for example, is demanding that the Ituna Itatá territory be dramatically reduced in size, while state and federal politicians allied to powerful logging, ranching and agribusiness interests target other territories. President Bolsonaro is highly sympathetic to these deadly land-grabbing efforts, and has explicitly said he wants to open up all indigenous territories for exploitation.
COIAB (the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon), OPI (Human Rights Watch of Isolated and Initial Contact Indigenous Peoples) and Survival – today launched a new video to expose Bolsonaro’s plan. They’re calling for the Brazilian government to renew the Land Protection Orders; evict all invaders; fully protect the territories; and #StopBrazilsGenocide.
Angela Kaxuyana, one of COIAB’s Coordinators, said today: “No more massacres! We won’t allow any more invasions! It’s vital that indigenous peoples and the organizations of the Amazon, and all civil society, mobilize to prevent the territories where the isolated indigenous peoples live from being handed over to loggers, land grabbers, gold miners and other forest predators to destroy. If the Bolsonaro government ends the Land Protection Orders, it will be yet another disaster and attack against the lives of these peoples, which is part of the grand plan to dismantle the indigenous policy in our country.
“We need to prevent more lives from being lost in this (un)government, we’ll carry on defending our rights to life, and those of our relatives who live autonomously in their territories.”
Fabrício Amorim of OPI said: “Land Protection Orders are a cutting-edge tool of public policy in Brazil, which can be deployed quickly to safeguard the lives and land rights of uncontacted indigenous peoples. They’re the highest expression of the precautionary principle, provided for in national and international laws. Doing away with them will mean the extermination of indigenous peoples, or some groups of them, without there even being time to recognize their existence in order to guarantee their rights. It will silence little-known lives and impoverish humanity. Therefore, it’s vital to strengthen these instruments, start demarcating these areas and remove all invaders.”
Elias Bígio, former head of the Uncontacted Tribes unit at Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency FUNAI, said today: “The Piripkura’s land has been occupied by aggressive and violent people who are destroying the environment and threatening everyone.
“The uncontacted Piripkura have shown that they don’t want contact. They don’t have the security of contact with ‘our’ society, given the traumatic relationship they’ve had with the invaders. They’re there in the forest, and they’ve devised strategies to protect themselves and survive. They’ve managed to survive and are there, hidden, restricted to a small territory, and claiming this territory for themselves.”
Sarah Shenker, Coordinator of Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, said today: “The future of several uncontacted tribes living in territories shielded by emergency Land Protection Orders will be decided this year. They have already experienced land theft and appalling violence and killings at the hands of outsiders. The orders are currently the only thing standing between them and certain death.
“The ranchers’ and politicians’ plot to rip up the orders, steal these lands, and wipe out the uncontacted tribes who live there, is one branch of many in the Bolsonaro government’s genocidal attack on Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and it must be blocked. Over the coming months, uncontacted tribes’ allies in Brazil and around the world will be campaigning non-stop for the orders to be renewed, all invaders evicted, and the forests to be fully protected. Only then can the uncontacted tribes survive and thrive.”
Notes to Editors
– Representatives from COIAB, OPAN, OPI and Survival are available for interview.
– The uncontacted tribal territories currently shielded by the Land Protection Orders are:
Territory | Expiration date | Area in Hectares
Piripkura (Mato Grosso) | 18 Sep 2021 | 243,000
Jacareúba/Katawixi (Amazonas) | 08 Dec 2021 | 647,000
Pirititi (Roraima) | 05 Dec 2021 | 43,000
Ituna Itatá (Pará) | 09 Jan 2022 | 142,000
Tanaru (Rondonia) | 26 Oct 2025 | 8,000
Igarapé Taboca do Alto Tarauacá (Acre) | Until the demarcation process is complete | 287
Kawahiva do Rio Pardo (Mato Grosso) | Until the demarcation process is complete | 412,000
The protection camp at Thacker Pass, Peehee mu’huh, has been in place for more than four months.
This episode is an update starting with a new recording from May 18th, as well as audio from recent video updates recorded on-site by Max Wilbert over the past month or so.
WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA— Following a challenge by multiple conservation groups, the U.S. Forest Service announced Thursday that it was halting a plan to clearcut more than 4,600 acres of native forests, log across an additional 9,000 acres and bulldoze up to 56 miles of road on lands just outside Yellowstone National Park in the Custer Gallatin National Forest.
In April, the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council challenged the South Plateau project, saying it would destroy habitat for grizzly bears, lynx, pine martens and wolverines. The logging project would have destroyed the scenery and solitude for hikers using the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, which crosses the proposed timber-sale area.
“This was another one of the Forest Service’s ‘leap first, look later’ projects where the agency asks for a blank check to figure out later where they’ll do all the clearcutting and bulldozing,” said Adam Rissien, a rewilding advocate at WildEarth Guardians. “Logging forests under the guise of reducing wildfires is not protecting homes or improving wildlife habitat, it’s just a timber sale. If the Forest Service tries to revive this scheme to clearcut native forests and bulldoze new roads in critical wildlife habitat just outside of Yellowstone, we’ll continue standing against it.”
In response to the group’s challenge, the Forest Service said it was withdrawing the South Plateau project until after it issues a new management plan for the Custer-Gallatin National Forest this summer. Then it plans to prepare a new environmental analysis of the project with “additional public involvement” to ensure the project complies with the new forest plan.
“This is a good day for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and for the grizzlies, lynx and other wildlife that call it home,” said Ted Zukoski, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Forest Service may revive this destructive project in a few months, but for now this beautiful landscape is safe from chainsaws and bulldozers.”
The project violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to disclose precisely where and when it would bulldoze roads and clearcut the forest, which made it impossible for the public to understand the project’s impacts, the groups said in their April objection. The project allowed removal of trees more than a century old, which provide wildlife habitat and store significant amounts of carbon dioxide, an essential component of addressing the climate emergency.
“The South Plateau project was in violation of the forest plan protections for old growth,” said Sara Johnson, director of Native Ecosystems Council and a former wildlife biologist for the Custer Gallatin National Forest. “The new forest plan has much weaker old-growth protections standards. That is likely why they pulled the decision — so they can resign it after the new forest plan goes into effect.”
“The Forest Service needs to drop the South Plateau project and quit clearcutting old-growth forests,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Especially clearcutting and bulldozing new logging roads in grizzly habitat on the border of Yellowstone National Park.”
Mining, aquaculture, plantations and other commercial activities have taken a toll on mangroves in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest extent of these important ecosystems.
On the Bangka-Belitung islands off Sumatra, residents of one village are doing their part to maintain the mangroves through replanting.
For the Batu Betumpang villagers, the mangroves are the source of the shrimp they use to make their belacan shrimp paste, a key source of livelihood here.
The villagers say there’s a growing awareness of the importance of mangroves, without which “our income will definitely decline because shrimp will run out.”
This article originally appeared on Mongabay.
Featured image: The lighthouse on Bangka’s Batu Betumpang Beach. Image by Nopri Ismi for Mongabay.
BANGKA, Indonesia — For more than two decades Ardianto has walked to the coastal mangrove trees from his village in Indonesia’s Bangka Island at sunrise with a triangular net, searching for rebon shrimp.
On returning home around 9 a.m. to his village of Batu Betumpang, Ardianto, commonly known as Lai Tin, and his wife begin pounding the catch of the day into a thick shrimp paste called belacan.
“After this is crushed, it dries again tomorrow,” Ardianto told Mongabay. “Then it’s pulverized again — and that’s how we get belacan.”
For centuries the mangrove trees around Bangka-Belitung province have provided food, medicine and more for the islands’ inhabitants.
But the once-teeming ecosystem fringed around the two main islands, about halfway between Singapore and Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, is today at risk of extinction.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelagic country, has more mangrove forests than anywhere else on Earth.
But vast areas of these valuable forests have been uprooted to make way for aquaculture farms, oil palm plantations and other uses along the archipelago’s coasts.
Bangka Island is also the source of about 90% of all the tin mined in Indonesia, the world’s second-largest producer of the metal, which is used mainly as solder in electronic devices.
This has added to the pressure on Bangka’s endangered mangroves as people migrate to the islands to mine tin around coastal areas. There are an estimated 20,000 tin miners on the island and about 700 mining concessions.
Data from the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), a prominent national pressure group, shows the province’s mangroves have been decimated.
Only 20 years ago the province was home to around 240,000 hectares (593,000 acres) of mangrove trees.
But today there are just over 33,000 hectares (82,000 acres) of mangroves in Bangka-Belitung.
Many rural communities in Bangka-Belitung have traditionally relied on these mangroves to earn an income from fishing and from making belacan shrimp paste.
Bangka-Belitung province is circled above. In the lower map, Bangka is the island on the left.
Men like Lai Tin walk down to the coast at dawn with their triangular nets to bring in shrimp, which is then prepared and sold by many of the village’s women.
But in recent years, dwindling stocks of shrimp have forced hundreds of fisherfolk to confront an escalating threat to their livelihoods.
Shrinking stocks of rebon shrimp mean many here are resorting to the inferior kampat shrimp.
Lai Tin’s village of Batu Betumpang in the south of Bangka Island is one of the few areas where the tradition survives, according to Rendi, a researcher at Bangka-Belitung University.
“Rebon shrimp can still be found by the shrimp paste makers because in that area some of the mangroves are still preserved,” Rendi told Mongabay in April. “The sea is free from marine tin mining.”
Lai Tin and his wife can usually dry the shrimp in a day — two days if it rains.
Sun, Lai Tin’s wife, dries rebon shrimp in the sun near a mosque in their village. Image by Nopri Ismi for Mongabay.
Catching shrimp is seasonal in Bangka-Belitung, with sufficient stocks available from around December to June.
“During those seven months about 500 kilograms [1,100 pounds] of rebon shrimp are collected,” Lai Tin said.
That’s enough raw material for 400 kilos (880 lb) of shrimp paste, the father of two said.
With a kilo of processed shrimp paste fetching 60,000 rupiah ($4) at market, that generates 24 million rupiah ($1,700) per year. That’s equivalent to almost eight times the province’s minimum monthly wage.
In addition to making shrimp paste, Lai Tin also cultivates vegetables and rice.
“I also look for fish if it is not shrimp season,” he said.
Lai Tin pounds shrimp with traditional tools. Image by Nopri Ismi for Mongabay.
Batu Betumpang village covers an area of 9,462 hectares (23,381 acres) with a population of almost 9,000 people.
The village dates back hundreds of years, with evidence suggesting Batu Betumpang was a prominent trading hub.
Dutch-era bunkers and wells lie near the beach among large granite boulders.
Across the strait separating Bangka from the mainland of Sumatra stands a 74-meter (243-foot) lighthouse built by the colonial Dutch East Indies government in 1888 to guide sailors crossing the water.
The mangroves here also offer the village protection from storm surges.
Last year, Indonesia announced an ambitious plan to plant mangrove trees in 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of damaged forests by 2024.
In Batu Betumpang, work has begun, planting 50,000 seedlings in a 25-hectare (62-acre) area.
“We plan to also plant the api-api and perpat mangroves,” said Ali Akbar, representing the Batu Betumpang Village Lighthouse Tourism Awareness Group. “But we had trouble getting the perpat seeds.”
The government has allocated funds to pay local people to help plant the mangroves, offering some income to those who have lost work due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The activity also builds public awareness — especially among the younger generation — of the importance of mangroves,” Ali said.
For Lai Tin and many other traditional farmers, the preservation of the local mangroves carries high importance.
“We are very happy with the planting — there are still many fish and shrimp,” he said. “If the mangroves are gone, yes, our income will definitely decline because shrimp will run out, like other areas in Bangka.”
