Musdi Siraju, a 19-year-old farmer, made his way down a steep, slippery hill barefoot on his way to a grove of coconut palm, canarium and nutmeg trees, where he went every step of the way to support his family on the island of Makian in eastern Indonesia. day works.
In 1512, colonial Portuguese traders, later pursued by the Dutch and the English, landed on Makian and other Moluccas to exploit their rich natural resources – once known as Spice Island for its abundance of nutmeg and cloves. Was.
Today, people in Musdi’s home village of Sebeli are earning more than what they grow here, an emerging economic model the government can use to boost rural livelihoods while protecting the natural landscape in the world’s largest archipelago nation.
Through an enterprise set up by village officials, residents are harvesting and selling canaris – mineral-rich nuts that grow from centuries-old trees about 30 meters (98 ft) high.
Samyun Asari, 60, the village head, said, “At that time they had come to collect spices with violence.” “Today we have self-determination.”
Canary nut, also known as pili, is versatile. Islanders eat it raw, mix it with sugar, bake it and add it to coffee, among other uses.
Until recently, it was traded only locally as a food staple, keeping prices low for hundreds of farmers such as Musadi.
But since 2019, a partnership with Jakarta-based food company Timurasa Indonesia has allowed farmers to increase production and drive demand for the little-known forest product.
“Very few people in Indonesia (even) know about canary nuts,” said Timurasa co-founder Erdi Rulianto.
The venture kicked into a high gear in August, when Taimursa placed an order for 500 kg (1,100 lb), its largest ever.
Ardi hopes to start exporting canary nuts to Europe from next year. “People think of almonds and cashews, but this product is overlooked,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
model village
Government figures show that one in four rural people in Indonesia’s underdeveloped eastern region live in poverty.
This means that many young people in the Molucca Islands, a region hit by sectarian violence at the turn of the century, see migration as a way of subsistence, Samyun said.
Over the past two years, the village head has signed papers to change the domiciles of over 50 young residents to allow them to work elsewhere.
“They go, but with a heavy heart,” he said.
Last year, Indonesia recorded its first recession since 1998. COVID-19 The pandemic saw a rise in unemployment and pushed the poverty rate above 10 percent for the first time since 2017.
Under its medium-term development plan, the government wants to reduce poverty to 7 percent by 2024.
Dani Usadi, who specializes in high-value products at the Ministry of Villages and Development, said that as part of that effort, it aims to set up about 75,000 village-owned enterprises in Sebeli over the next three years.
Usadi said around 42,000 have been established so far.
The Sebeli project includes funding for six small greenhouses, where canary nuts placed on aluminum trays dry in a day or two – faster and better than the traditional way of leaving them on the side of the road.
The nuts are then loaded onto boats bound for the port of Ternate, from where they are sent to Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, to be packaged into retail products.
Erdi in Taimursa said wastage due to moisture in transit has halved since the greenhouse began operations, while a planned shift from air freight to shipping containers could cut logistics costs by 60 percent.
Hardy Yasim, another member of the village-owned business in Sebeli, said the project should enable his family to buy books and uniforms when their children start school.
Last year, Hardy made an average of about 500,000 rupees ($35) per month, but he expects efforts to stock the canaries on further shelves could add up to 2 million rupees.
“We will be safer,” he said.
government aid
Inspired by the expansion of palm oil and mining permits, northern Maluku province, where Makian Island is located, has lost about 7 percent of its old-growth trees over the past two decades, according to the Global Forest Watch Monitoring Service.
According to a 2020 study published in the journal Tropical Forests, tropical forests play a key role in slowing climate warming, storing 250 billion tons of planet-heating carbon in their trees alone — 90 years of global fossil-fuel emissions at current levels. Equal to. Nature,
Forestry scientists say low productivity among small-scale farmers who grow everything from palm oil to coffee has meant that many have had to clear land to earn enough for their daily needs.
But as incomes from such projects in Sebeli increase, they could also ease the pressure on forests in some areas – with appropriate government support, said Ani Adivinata Navier, a scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research.
Navier, who has worked with rural enterprises in eastern Indonesia, said communities also need extension services, business training and greater access to post-harvest technology.
He said this would allow farmers to improve yields from existing trees instead of opening up new land to plant more saplings.
It’s too early to know how long Indonesia’s sustainable forest economy plan will last, but the extra income has helped Musdi keep his family together.
He was planning to leave home in search of work, until his father died last year and knew he would have to stay to support his mother and two younger siblings. The village enterprise made that decision easy, he said. “After I started, I didn’t want to leave anymore,” he said.
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