2) Review essay: In the shadow of the palms
1) “Green” finance bankrolls forest destruction in Indonesia
Published on 01/06/2023, 2:00am
Green funds have been spent cutting down trees for biomass to make electricity, decimating the traditional food sources of indigenous people
Millions of dollars in green financing intended to help Indonesia reduce its carbon emissions have been invested in a project that is destroying rainforest in Papua.
The money has been used to help an Indonesian conglomerate, Medco Group construct a biomass power plant that makes electricity from burning wood.
Medco has already cleared large tracts of rainforest, establishing timber plantations in its place.
As a result of the financing, it plans to expand its plantations by at least 2,500 hectares – seven times the size of New York’s Central Park – and cut down more rainforest.
The project has made it harder for Marind people, hunter-gatherers indigenous to the lowlands of Papua, to find food to eat.
With food in the shops expensive, many families are going hungry, eating meals consisting solely of rice. Children have died of malnutrition.
Rainforest to wood chips
Medco’s project started in the late 2000s, as part of Indonesia’s push to convert southern Papua into a source of food and energy.
The company’s initial plan was to plant a vast timber plantation that would produce wood chips for export.
Medco obtained a licence for some 170,000 hectares of land, overlapping substantially with the ancestral territory of Marind people living in Zanegi village.
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Before the deforestation began, villagers said, they could find food a few steps from their homes.
It was common to see cassowaries – a flightless bird similar to a turkey – in their backyards.
Boar and kangaroos roamed around the village, and the swamps were full of fish.
Early promises
Still, some villagers welcomed the arrival of Medco. The company assuaged concerns by handing out cash and promising jobs, support for children’s education and a new school, church and health facilities.
The company signed a written agreement in 2009 committing it to protect sacred places, areas of cultural importance, hunting grounds, and what Medco described as “other places considered important to the community.”
“At the beginning, it was good, because the people got jobs,” said Amandus Gebze, a Marind father of nine. “Everyone was involved in the work, there were no exceptions.”
But within a few years, the villagers were fired. The regular income Medco had provided dried up, replaced mostly with irregular work picking up small pieces of wood for $5 a cubic metre.
Asked why the employees had lost their jobs, Medco said that it stopped clearing the forest in 2014 because it was losing money. But it added that it had switched from employing staff directly, to working
through “contractors or third parties.”
The company then suggested the villagers had lost their jobs because they were unable to “comply with company regulations” and were “often absent,” and were therefore considered to have resigned.
Food sources wrecked
Some villagers returned to hunting to provide food for their families. But Medco had replaced a ten kilometre wide stretch of natural forest with a man-made plantation of identical trees.
In interviews, nine villagers said it had become significantly harder to source their traditional foods.
They now had to roam up to 15 kilometres away to hunt cassowaries or deer and often returned empty-handed several days in a row.
The groves of sago, which produce a starchy staple food like tapioca, had been spared from clearing. But the denuded landscape meant they’d been ruined by mud and chemicals.
With free local food sources drying up, the villagers are forced to buy food that comes in by pick-up track and often costs more than it would in a high-end supermarket in Indonesia’s big cities.
Empty rice
Without a secure income and their traditional food sources declining, some villagers told us it has become common for them to eat only rice, a meal they refer to as nasi kosong or “empty rice.”
The Gecko Project observed Amandus Gebze’s family prepare a breakfast of rice with two packets of noodles, split between the parents and six siblings.
Some families will sprinkle pepper on the rice to make it edible. Others will pour salt water on it or just drink large quantities of water to help them swallow it.
In April 2022, health workers stationed in the village told the Gecko Project that four children were stunted and eight pregnant women were suffering from chronic energy deficiency, a health risk to them and their babies.
Health records obtained during an investigation by the Indonesian newspaper Kompas in August last year showed that around a third of young children measured were stunted.
Since 2012, there have been reports of a total of nine malnourished children from Zanegi dying. Indonesian newspaper Kompas found that between 2019 and 2021, one family alone lost three children.
Not our fault
Medco rejected the suggestion that this could be linked to its project. “Medco Papua’s operations do not cause malnutrition,” it wrote. “No community food sources were disturbed.”
However, it also said that the “allegations presented by The Gecko Project regarding malnutrition incidents require further in-depth investigation”.
Medco denied making promises to the community, beyond the written agreement to protect their food sources and other key areas.
It insisted that it had made efforts to help improve the plight of the community, despite its project losing money.
Green funding boost
Medco claimed that its project’s progress was limited to 3,000 hectares of land because it was not financially viable.
This is supported by satellite imagery, which shows the forests around Zanegi being cleared rapidly after 2010, then largely stopping in 2014.
But in 2017, the Indonesian government gave Medco’s failing project a new lease of life.
It provided financing to help Medco construct a new biomass power plant 20 kilometres away from Zanegi while the state-owned electricity company committed to buying the energy it would generate.
Satellite imagery shows the new power plant emerging, 20 kilometres south-east of Zanegi, in late 2018. In 2021, it also shows deforestation resuming, north of Zanegi.
The backers – SMI
The first tranche of government funding came from PT Sarana Multi Infrastruktur (SMI), a state-owned company under the control of the Ministry of Finance.
In 2017, it provided 60 billion rupiah ($4.5 million) in “project financing” for the power plant.
SMI was established in 2009 to provide infrastructure financing, but has been increasingly focused on helping Indonesia meet its climate change commitments.
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Its 2017 sustainability report suggested that Medco’s power plant could help Indonesia deliver on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In a 2020 presentation, an SMI director presented the plant as an example of “financing to contribute towards climate change mitigation”.
This was despite nonprofits saying publicly, including to the UN, that the Medco project was making the Marind go hungry.
SMI declined to comment.
The backers – IEF
In 2021, the energy ministry and Medco said that another government fund, the Indonesian Environment Fund (IEF), had also provided “funding support” for the biomass power plant.
Budi Basuki, a senior Medco executive, said that the total funding had reached 140 billion rupiah, more than $9 million.
The IEF was established in 2019 as a body that could be used to channel investments to protect the environment.
When it received IEF’s support, Medco had already cleared an estimated 3,000 hectares of forest.
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The company said it needs to almost double the size of its plantation to meet the demands of the power plant, and that it would continue to use wood harvested from the forest as it is cleared.
It also hopes to triple the capacity of the plant, creating demand for more land and wood.
Government maps show that as of 2012, large areas of its concession were intact, or “primary”, rainforest and swamp forests.
Analysis of satellite imagery by The Gecko Project indicates that the area remains largely undisturbed. These landscapes hold large amounts of carbon that are released if they are cleared.
Endah Tri Kurniawaty, of the IEF, said that the area had been designated a “production forest” and said that it was therefore legitimate for Medco to cut the forest and replace it with a plantation. “According to the existing
laws and regulations, they may do that,” she said.
Co-firing to net zero
The Indonesian government’s support for biomass in Papua is not an aberration.
Rather than shutting down its coal-fired power plants, it plans to keep the furnaces burning but phase out a portion of the fossil fuels by “co-firing” with biomass.
Last June, the energy minister Arifin Tasrif, identified this kind of “co-firing” as central to its strategy for reducing emissions from coal.
While the Merauke operation is small compared to the network of vast power plants spread across Indonesia, dozens of them are also burning biomass.
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The state energy company, PLN, announced in 2022 that it planned to increase its use of biomass five-fold over the next year, and had set a target of burning 10.2 million tonnes across more than 50 power plants by 2025.
According to PLN, by 2022 the majority of its biomass came from waste, like sawdust, rice or palm oil husks. But to meet the massively growing demand it needs timber plantations.
The environment ministry has rallied behind the policy.
At the UN climate conference in Egypt last November, Agus Justianto, the director general of sustainable forest management, said that it would “promote plantation forests for energy development” and that more than a million
hectares of “production forest” could be used.
Trend Asia, a nonprofit organisation that has been monitoring the policy, calculated that meeting this demand would require at least 2.3 million hectares of land to be converted to plantations – an area half the size of Denmark.
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Timber plantations can be established on “degraded” lands, as the government has suggested could happen now. But as with Medco’s project, they have often been planted in place of rainforests, which has the advantage for
investors of generating a steady-stream of timber before the plantations reach maturity.
“The use of biomass is renewable in theory, but in practice it is not,” said Yuyun Indradi of Trend Asia. “Timber plantations have been a major driver of deforestation. So our concern is that it’s very likely this will trigger deforestation.”
“There’s no hope”
In Zanegi, the Marind have now spent more than a decade observing how policies decided thousands of miles away – and the whims of a corporation – can influence their lives.
Natalia Mahuze, wife of Amandus Gebze, stood barefoot with her three-year old son Efrem under the shade of a tree outside the Zanegi village health centre in April 2022.
The midwife emerged with a digital body-weight scale. She called Efrem’s name and his mother guided him into the scale: 10.7 kilograms – underweight for his age.
The midwife handed Efrem a pack of biscuits to supplement his diet, and took a photo of him holding the packet with her mobile phone. She gave another to his mother.
“Please don’t share these with his siblings,” the midwife told Natalia. “They’re only for him.”
Efrem was born around the time Medco completed construction of its power plant in Merauke.
“It used to be good,” Natalia said. “It’s really hard now.”
Her husband Amandus, once optimistic about Medco’s project, questioned whether it would ever deliver for his family.
“If they want to develop the community, they’ll need more of our territory,” he said. “If we have to give them more land, is there any chance they’ll show more concern for us? There’s no hope.”
This story was published in collaboration with Gecko Project, Project Multatuli, Mongabay and Climate Home News.
Isabell Herrmans
In the Shadow of the Palms by Sophie Chao is first and foremost a book about oil palm and how it has affected the Marind of West Papua, an indigenous people who live in its shadows. In essence, and at its heart, it is a critical study of aggressive agribusiness at a tropical resource frontier and its accompanying dark sides of deforestation, dispossession, and desolation. However, it is about much more than that.
In equal measure a work about the changing political ecology and multispecies relations of the Marind, as well as the phenomenological dimensions of their recent thoroughgoing lifeworld changes, it is a rich and theoretically dense ethnography of multifaceted interest. Its greatest virtue perhaps lies in how it cross-illuminates and demonstrates the mutual constitution of these spheres, and in how it sheds light on them through the stories, personal reflections, affective experiences, and dreams of Marind subjects. Through this agenda, the book provides a refreshingly distinct contribution to the evolving field of anthropological oil palm studies, and to political and more-than-human anthropology in general.
Spotlighting the radical nature of change caused by oil palm cultivation, Chao describes how ‘time came to a halt’ for the Marind, when in around 2011 extensive industrial monocrop oil palm plantations of several hundred thousand hectares were established on their customary forest lands without their informed consent. Oil palm not only transformed their physical and relational landscape, and brought deforestation, water pollution and biodiversity loss, but came to form a two-way temporal marker, which erased the past inscribed in that landscape; it deprived them of hope and their imagined future.
Chao’s account of how oil palm refigured the Marind’s sense of time, and life as they knew it, resonates closely with how the Luangan people in Kalimantan with whom I have done fieldwork, conceptualise the onset of oil palm cultivation. There is a clear demarcation between life before and after oil palm. While this demonstrates the immensely disruptive collateral effects that oil palm has on indigenous lifeworlds, it is, as Chao rightly observes, important that we attend to the singularity of such experiences. To me, it is precisely in her commitment to exploring indigenous epistemologies and lifeworld experiences on the ground, beyond objective socio-environmental facts, that Chao’s book makes its strongest impression.
‘A multispecies act’
A striking feature of the Marind, vouching for Chaos’s multispecies approach, is that they have been more intrigued by oil palm as a puzzling and destructive plant-being, than in blaming the politics or market forces that drew it into their region in the first place. For them, oil palm is crucially a source of curiosity, fear and wonder, which speaks powerfully to their imagination and subconscious. A central and vivid expression of this is the remarkably prevalent dreams of being eaten by oil palm, experienced and collectively shared by numerous Marind. Documenting how the Marind consider the oil palm as a wilful alien agent with mysterious but predominantly malevolent intentions paves the way for Chao’s central argument that the violence inflicted upon them through oil palm plantations and politics in the form of deprivation, estrangement and anguish, must be considered ‘a multispecies act’. The plant itself holds agency and its distinct intrinsic qualities are essential to how this violence plays out.
On the one hand, this enables Chao to justifiably criticise a bias in multispecies anthropology toward viewing plants and human-plant entanglements as intrinsically benevolent. On the other, her inclination to challenge universalist assumptions of human exceptionalism and her methodically adopted ‘ontological stance’ to take plants seriously as more-than-human agents, may come across as somewhat biased toward certain Marind understandings at the expense of others. Even as the oil palm is in some ways eminently suited to the plantation economy’s production and racialising regime, it does not really choose a solitary relation-negating life in monocrop plantations. Rather than its own qualities or agency, the reasons why the oil palm is not ‘good to live with,’ mainly reflect the fact also deplored by Chao’s interlocutors, that ‘every stage of the plant’s growth is determined, or controlled, by human agents’. Elsewhere, Chao devotes plenty of attention to the capitalist and racialising structures mediating oil palm violence and criticises the multispecies turn for failing to do this.
While the book focuses on the new and adverse multispecies and political-ecological relations that oil palm has brought in its wake, it also provides a contrast – and intended positive light – by giving an account of the Marind’s continuing traditional subsistence and life-generating relations with beings of the local forest and swamps. This includes the oil palm’s ‘vegetal antagonist,’ the sago palm, the Marind’s main food staple. Whereas the oil palm is seen as mainly destructive and debilitating, the influence of sago is perceived as providing life and sustenance. Beyond offering alimentary nourishment, the extraction of sago starch through strenuous but valued collective work in sago groves is essential to Marind conceptions of wellbeing by entailing the ‘sharing of skin’ and the acquisition of ‘wetness’. These are vitalising processes whereby they grow as human persons through sensory interaction with more-than-human entities in the environment. While it may be questionable, as Chao suggests, that the Marind should therefore be perceived as practicing a ‘posthuman ethic’, and that this claim furthers her aspiration of giving voice to ‘Indigenous epistemologies’, her rich, ethnographically detailed account of these processes, and her accentuation of their affective constitution through concrete lived practices, represents a particularly fruitful use of her multispecies perspective.
Shadows
A central argument of the book is that due to oil palm, the Marind’s world has turned shadowy not only in the sense of being darkened, but also hazy or ambiguous. She describes this condition through the concept of abu-abu, a Papuan-Malay and Indonesian term which most literally designates greyness – such as of the haze of burning forest cleared for plantations – but also uncertainty and opacity. This concept is used to analyse the realm of ambiguity or the state of ‘onto-epistemic murk’ of the Marind’s present life conditions, and she proposes that it represents ‘an affect and an atmosphere’, and even a ‘force’. In much of her multilayered use of the term, it designates the same semantic space and is deployed for the same polemical ends as Anna Tsing’s resource-frontier analytical tools ‘friction’ and ‘margins’. It is taken to highlight the indeterminate, multidetermined and unexpected qualities of an in-between, interstitial sphere, and prominently, to show its potential for subtle resistance through imaginative everyday acts.
In the Shadow of the Palms is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, and Chao often allows ethnography to take centre stage in the book. Each of its eight chapters start with sensuous and sensitive ethnographic storytelling opening up to different aspects of the abu-abu condition. The main chapters are interspersed with translated songs and poetic dream accounts. Part of the theoretical discussion is suitably relegated into an extensive system of endnotes. Even so, Chao continuously draws upon and situates her observations and interpretations within an impressively erudite, if somewhat analytically overpowering, framework of current posthumanist, postcolonial, and critical indigenous studies theory. This has the effect of sometimes indulging the reader in the company of other anthropologists and philosophers more than her Marind companions. Chao may succeed in her aspiration to ‘avoid imposing a carapace of theory over the moving flesh of ethnography’, in the sense that no single theoretical perspective significantly restrains the multidirectional ramification of her arguments. However, the constant positioning of her observations in relation to other theorists is sometimes diverting, and arguably undermines her ambition to ‘collapse hierarchical distinctions between Western theory and non-Western cosmology’.
Dissonance
Another concept which runs through the book to a somewhat similar effect as abu-abu is the counterpoint, an analytical term derived from music, which Chao uses to describe the differential relation of contrasting, typically opposed, elements. These are phenomena and concepts that are salient or observably important, in the Marind’s lifeworld or their ontology, but the synchrony of which, unlike in music, mostly produces not harmony but dissonance. Focusing on the contrapuntal dynamics that affect Marind lives works to demonstrate the co-presence and conjunctive influence of opposing and often irreconcilable forces in them, and typically, their greying or muddling ‘abu-abu effects’. A contrapuntal, dialectical, style of argumentation also pervades Chao’s argumentation throughout the book, at times even down to the level of singular sentences. In addition, the concept is also adopted as a compositional device to structure the book itself, which she presents as being organised around four ‘contrapuntal couplets’.
The first of these couplets, ‘place and maps’, concerns two distinct contrapuntal dynamics, which are the subject of the book’s first two chapters. Chapter 1 describes the making of the Marind landscape through the movements of the Marind within it and the obstruction of movement by the state and corporations. While the forest, an instance of ‘place’, becomes relationally constituted and animated through the movement of its inhabitants (human and non-human), topographic pressure points in the form of roads, military garrisons and plantations essentially restrict or redirect movement. Chapter 2 contrasts ‘dead’ government maps with the practice of community-shaped participatory mapping, a sort of ‘counter-mapping’ introduced by non-government organisations (NGOs) to support indigenous peoples’ land right claims. The chapter recounts a concrete mapping expedition to exemplify the counter-mapping practice, which is advanced an example of abu-abu resistance. Contesting the straight lines and fixity of government maps, and the erasure of the Marind – their history and rights – through them, the maps produced by the Marind themselves ‘refuse to sit still’ and are ‘alive’ with the movement and sounds of the forest’s inhabitants.
The second couplet, humans-turned cassowary and cassowary-turned-human, refers to ways of becoming and staying human or animal, principally through the sharing of skin and wetness with other forest species, processes which Chao considers in chapter 3 and 4. Echoing descriptions from Amazonian ethnography, skin-sharing may turn into skin-changing, by which humans adopt the embodied perspective of another species, sometimes to irreversible effect, exemplified by a man who adopted the body and perspective of a cassowary and was unable to return to his human bodily being. Similarly, seeking shelter and nutrition in Marind villages when oil palm plantations have shattered their natural habitat, animals sometimes become too human, losing their wildness. This was the case with the orphan cassowary, nicknamed the plastic cassowary, which, having been brought up in the village and accustomed to human company and store-bought food, refused to return to the wild, provoking feelings of sadness and anxiety among Marind, reminding them of their own subjugation to Indonesian rule and their lost freedom and autonomy.
The third couplet considers the symbolic opposition between sago palm and oil palm, principally in chapter 5 and 6. Chapter 5, portrays the Marind’s intimate relations with sago. Chao describes a trip to a sago grove where Marind go ‘to know sago’, the practice of extracting and processing starch, which is much more than a technical activity. She details how the activities of extracting, processing, caring for, consuming, singing and telling stories of sago are deeply affective practices that affirm Marind social relations to each other, their animal kin, ancestral creator spirits and the living environment that supports them. Eating sago also constitutes a political action, Chao asserts, establishing the Marind’s collective identity as ‘sago people’, as distinct from rice-eating settlers. Whereas sago is relation-affirming, oil palm, as discussed in chapter 6, is experienced as alien, solitary and selfish, refusing reciprocal relations with Marind, producing food primarily for other people. While considered violent, oil palm is also subject to a great deal of curiosity among Marind and pitied for its solitary existence in monocrop plantations, far away from its native soil and kin.
‘Hopelessness and hope in dreams’, the subject of the last couplet, deals with temporal counterpoints. Chao returns to consideration of how oil palm stopped time, annihilating the future, but contrasts this with how shared dream accounts may provide for some small glimpses of hope. As Marind express it, ‘hope cannot exist if time has stopped’. Such denial of hope is the topic of chapter 7, which argues that giving up on the future forms a sort of resistance by which Marind refuse to give in to modernity’s future-building projects.
The book’s ethnographically compelling final chapter, ‘Eaten by oil palm’, examines the Marind dreams of being eaten by oil palm. In these haunting and seemingly contagious dreams individual Marind experience their own death, often repeatedly, arousing feelings of panic, fear and nausea. At the same time, the sharing of these dreams through dream accounts is supportive, according to Chao, creating solidarity among oil palm violence victims. While never downplaying the magnitude of the depredation and devastation caused by the oil palm, In the Shadow of the Palms thus never loses sight of the possibilities for agency and regeneration remaining in the ruination.
Sophie Chao, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, Duke University Press, 2022.
Isabell Herrmans is visiting research fellow at Center for Advanced Studies – Erlangen, Friedrich Alexander University. She is the author of Ritual retellings: Luangan healing performances through practice, New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2015.
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