The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  Some state governments and NGOs in Australia have been considering buying some of the unused land for conservation. The pastures stretching across the tropical north of Australia in particular are among the world’s last great unfenced savannah grasslands. They are of comparable value, say ecologists, to the cerrado in Brazil. And Aborigines, the original owners of every billabong and backwood, have a claim too.

  Right on cue, the U.S. Nature Conservancy passed around the hat, got a big donation from the 3M Corporation, and bought 440,000 acres of savannah grassland beside the Daly River south of Darwin. The land comprised the abandoned Fish River Station cattle ranch. Yet another foreign land grab? It seemed not. The title to the land was promptly passed on to the Australian government’s Indigenous Land Corporation, for the use of aboriginal people.

  Here at least, foreign money was being used to give the land back to its rightful owners.

  Part 4: China’s Backyard

  Chapter 15. Sumatra, Indonesia: Pulping the Jungle

  All seemed to be well at first, as we traveled up the Indragiri River, snaking through the Sumatran rain forest. We passed a few fishermen in their boats, and heard the occasional sound of motorbikes. There was a mobile phone tower in the distance. But trees covered the riverbanks even as we approached Kuala Cenaku, a straggling bankside community of some 7,000 inhabitants. It was only as I clambered off the boat and walked down a long, swaying boardwalk that I realized something was amiss as, beyond the trees, I caught sight of an empty, mangled, and burnt land stretching into the distance.

  The people here in Riau province in central Sumatra have for centuries depended on the forest around them. They have harvested rattan creepers to make furniture, taken honey from hives deep in the bush, cut timber to construct their homes, and planted rubber trees in clearings on their traditional lands. Things have gradually changed, of course. There is a road now, along which trucks bring soft drinks, cookies, jars of coffee, and other basics of modern life. The villagers sell produce to raise cash to buy these and other twenty-first-century necessities, such as mobile phones and motorbikes.

  But the modern world had always impinged as fast or as slowly as the villagers have wanted. Nothing prepared them for the loggers. Mursyid Muhammad Ali, the village head, grabbed my arm as I left the boardwalk. He said that a year before my visit, the loggers just showed up, like invaders from outer space. “One day, we were just robbed of our communal land.” The outsiders arrived with bulldozers and chainsaws and claimed some 20,000 acres of their land. The forest had been given to their company by the government.

  There was no argument, no arbitration, and no means of redress. The chainsaw gangs began cutting down the forest, for three miles south of the river. They burned the scrub. They cut canals into the boggy ground to float the logs out. They shipped the most valuable timber to a plywood company in the neighboring province. They chipped the rest on site and sent it off to a pulp mill 45 miles to the north, run by Asia Pulp and Paper.

  That mill, the residents of Kuala Cenaku swiftly learned, was one of the world’s largest producers of pulp to make paper. The mill was gobbling up the forests of Riau as fast as loggers could deliver the wood. Until the late 1980s, Riau was 80 percent jungle. Today the figure is just 30 percent. The people of Kuala Cenaku had just become part of a global network of exploitation that ultimately fills desktop printers across the planet with shiny white paper. The juggernaut that supplies that network would leave behind nothing of their rain forest.

  Sheltering from the rain in the loggers’ abandoned sawmill behind the village, my guide from the environment group WWF checked her laptop for Landsat images. The loggers had cleared 40 square miles of jungle around here in the past eighteen months. All was silent now, but they had left behind a wasteland of charred wood on drying peat. Mursyid said that, as village head, he had filed a report to the authorities about the invasion, claiming this was a violation of their land rights. “The district government said that it would issue a warrant for the company to stop. The land should return to the status quo till the dispute was resolved,” he told me. “But the company ignored that. I have had no response since.” A year on, the land grab was a fait accompli. That’s the way things are done in Indonesia. “We have no means of living here now,” he said. “People are leaving to get jobs elsewhere.”

  Tied up at the river jetty was a boatful of rubber seedlings. The remaining villagers had bought the seedlings in the nearest town, Rengat. They planned to plant them, as a first step to restoring their forest. “We want to plant rattan, too,” one villager told me. “But we have to get our land back first.” Fat chance. The logging company now planned to plant oil palm on their land. And the intact forest beyond the charred lands, which the community said was also theirs, was earmarked for a new logging concession. Its trees too would end up in the mill.

  Traveling the backwaters of this rapidly deforesting land, I spotted Syamsir in his longboat, checking his shrimp nets. Fishing the rivers is a major activity here. Or was. He brandished a small plastic bag containing two days’ catch. “The river is polluted after the loggers came,” he shouted. “I used to catch ten kilograms a day, now I get less than one kilogram.” We gave him a tow back to the jetty where he would sell the shrimps for 40,000 rupia, or around four dollars. With that, he had nine children to support.

  These are the everyday stories of economic development in Indonesia today. Development built on one of the largest, most systematic and ruthless land-grabbing operations in the world. The island of Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest, is twice the size of Britain. It was until recently home to one of the world’s largest intact rain forests. Its inhabitants still claim their customary land rights. But these were made virtually worthless half a century ago. The country’s newly installed President Suharto declared the forestlands of his sprawling nation of a thousand islands to be “state forest.” They were to be deployed in the name of national development, part of the “new order” initially thrust on him by a group of U.S.-trained Indonesian economists known as the “Berkeley mafia.” In practice, in his hands, it meant they would be handed out to anyone with the cash and the connections.

  What future did that leave for the forest residents?

  In this part of Sumatra, their fate has been sealed overwhelmingly by two men, both Chinese Indonesians, who are now among Asia’s richest men. Their adopted Indonesian names are Sukanto Tanoto and Eka Tjipta Widjaja. They have been fierce rivals for decades, as they got rich building two of the world’s largest pulp mills, and then feeding those mills with timber. The mills are located 25 miles apart near Pangkalan Kerinci, in what were once the jungles of Riau.

  Until the first bulldozers arrived in 1994, Kerinci was a tiny forest village. Then four thousand Indonesian laborers cleared 7 square miles of forest, constructed a river port, laid 30 miles of site railways, and erected a billion-dollar pulp mill designed by Tanoto’s Finnish consultants. Machinery arrived from Sweden, Japan, Canada, the United States, Germany, Taiwan, India, and Britain. Soon after, Widjaja took over and expanded his own mill, which now covers 10 square miles and employs ten thousand workers. Pangkalan Kerinci became a boomtown of fifty thousand people, with a company airport receiving regular flights across the Straits of Malacca from Singapore. This was development of a sort, bringing in laborers from across the island and beyond. But the cowboy economy was a disaster both for the inhabitants of the forests and for the environment. And it would only last as long as the trees.

  Together, the two mills represent probably the most concentrated industrial demand for wood in the world. They each consume around 10 million tons of timber a year, perhaps a third of it hacked from the natural rain forests of Riau. The rest is harvested from huge stands of acacia and eucalyptus being planted on deforested land. The two mills produce more than 4 million tons of pulp annually from the 20 million tons of cut timber. That pulp is turned into paper sold around the wo
rld. There is a fair chance their products are in your printer right now.

  This is industrial forestry on a grand scale. Nobody can compete. Forests from Vermont to Finland have closed in the past decade as Sumatra’s pulp bonanza has taken their markets. And business continues to boom. Industry analysts say Asia will need 3.5 billion cubic feet more pulp by 2020, requiring 10 million acres more forest. Both companies say they have plans to expand their mills further. Both companies continue to make pulp from cleared rain forest.

  Eka Tjipta Widjaja was born Oei Ek Tjhong. He emigrated from China to Sulawesi in Indonesia with his family at the age of nine. He started in business selling cookies and other baked goods from a bicycle rickshaw. Later he sold provisions to Indonesian troops across the far-flung Indonesian archipelago. He founded his industrial company, today called Sinar Mas, in 1962. As it grew, it acquired paper and pulp mills, oil-palm plantations, banks, chemical works, and huge land concessions.

  Sinar Mas’s biggest subsidiary, in charge of Widjaja’s pulp and paper business, is Asia Pulp and Paper. APP has logged forests from Yunnan in China to Cambodia to the Indonesian side of the island of New Guinea. But its biggest operation is in the forests around its huge mill in Sumatra. Since the mid-1990s, APP has been responsible for destroying more than 2 million acres of Sumatra’s rain forests.

  Widjaja, named Indonesia’s richest man in 2011, is flamboyant, famously wearing a belt buckle that spells out his first name, Eka, in diamonds. He is also a dynastic patriarch. He has more than a dozen wives and at least forty children, several of whom have taken top jobs inside his growing corporation. APP, like its owner, has a cowboy reputation. It has been convicted of illegal logging in several countries. An American researcher writing in the Asian Times concluded in 2004 that “APP’s business model is a tactically aggressive one: it turns huge profits by quickly stripping forests bare, exploiting age-old forests and indigenous peoples, and leaving town before the environmental consequences are felt. By the time communities and governments lodge complaints and lawsuits, APP has divested itself of local interests and assets.”

  Well, that is sometimes true. But in Sumatra, buoyed by strong political connections, APP seems to be in for the long haul. And that looks like bad news for the locals. For where they have objected to the takeover of their land, the company’s response has often been ruthless.

  Take the activities of one of Sinar Mas’s logging subsidiaries, Arara Abadi. It operates in a part of Riau known as Siak, a former sultanate from the days before Suharto. In the late 1990s, Arara Abadi was under intense pressure to keep the new mill supplied with timber. According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, it moved its chainsaws unannounced onto land occupied by indigenous Sakai and Malay families, who practiced shifting cultivation as well as tapping local rubber and collecting rattan and forest fruits.

  Usually people slink away when the loggers arrive. But the Sakai felt unusually sure of their rights. The Sultan of Siak had acknowledged their traditional claim to the land and given them formal title in 1940—a fact acknowledged on post-independence state maps. State officials had ignored this when in 1996 they handed over 250,000 acres of forest around the village as a logging concession to Arara Abadi. Since then, the company had been trying to evict the villagers, with the help of local police—who were no doubt grateful that the company had recently built them a new police station in the district capital.

  After the company seized lands around the village of Mandiangin, villagers blocked logging roads, trapping equipment. The company responded in force to reclaim the land and equipment. According to Human Rights Watch, “hundreds of Arara Abadi enforcers armed with clubs attacked three villages with disputes against the company, beating scores of residents, injuring nine seriously, and abducting 63.” The company denies that any force was used.

  It was not just their land that the villagers were losing. An elder at one of the villages said afterwards: “What will happen to us? We will become just thieves and gangsters and prostitutes. Before we used to assist each other. When people made an agreement, we considered it agreed. Now everyone distrusts everyone else, and there is no feeling that law or rights have any meaning.”

  The confrontations between Arara Abadi and the Sakai have continued ever since. In December 2008, Amnesty International reported that a decade-long dispute over the village of Suluk Bongkai had culminated in police helicopters dropping firebombs, while some five hundred paramilitaries invaded. Two children reportedly died, and four hundred villagers fled to the forest as their homes burned. It said Arara Abadi then bulldozed the village. The National Human Rights Commission concluded later that police had committed human rights abuses, but none was brought to justice.

  However, Arara Abadi’s public relations manager, Nurul Huda, denied that the company had used intimidation or violence against villagers. “We are not robbing the community’s land. We control the land for conversion into pulpwood plantation,” he said, under a 1996 concession from the Ministry of Forestry. The company had sought a legal settlement of the dispute.

  APP’s assault on the jungles of Riau seems to have been fueled in part by competition with Widjaja’s rival, Sukanto Tanoto. The son of a migrant from Fujian province in China, Tanoto was born Tan Kaung Ho in northern Sumatra. Like Widjaja, he worked his way up from humble beginnings by using powerful politicians as patrons. His talent was spotted by Suharto when he was twenty-six. The connection allowed him to raise cash to build a mill near his birthplace to turn timber into rayon, a textile made from cellulose fiber. His Indorayon Utama mill produced the cheapest pulp in the world, he said at the time. Maybe so. But it also cut corners and attracted huge local opposition over pollution.

  After a crackdown on protesters in 1989 had left several dead, Tanoto was forced to shut the plant for five years. But by then he had moved on, eventually relocating his business empire, Raja Garuda Mas International, to Singapore. The basis of its wealth today is Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL), the pulp giant that built the second giant Riau mill complex. I went to visit.

  Around the mill complex, Tanoto has created an almost self-contained empire in the jungle. It has a road network largely independent of the state highways, traveled by vast forty-four-wheel “road trains” that are too heavy and dangerous for public roads. They supply 22,000 tons of timber a day to the mill. “The gobbling monster requires feeding,” said my company guide, APRIL’s then sustainability director Neil Franklin. And so do customers across the world. The company’s flagship brand of office copying paper, PaperOne, is sold in more than fifty countries.

  In the past decade and a half, APRIL has chopped down more than 2 million acres of forest in Riau. That is almost a tenth of the province. It claims that it has subsequently planted about half of the logged land with acacia, giving it “the biggest plantation operation in the world.” Local environmentalists question this claim. In any event, like its rival, it remains a major deforester.

  From the number of mud-spattered Land Cruisers traveling the logging roads of Riau, it is clear that the destruction is generating wealth. But in this “wild east,” there are more losers than winners. And the companies’ attitudes to people whose lands they have grabbed is troubling. “We turn former illegal loggers into committed stakeholders,” says APRIL’s company video. But such language is deliberately derogatory and shows ignorance of the people they are talking about. As the Minority Rights Group notes: “The term ‘illegal loggers’ is frequently used to obscure community rights claims, and make legitimate grievances . . . appear as criminal activity.”

  The idea that APRIL is creating jobs for the locals is also PR gloss. One of the company’s field managers told me: “We never use local labor when we can avoid it. We normally employ people from other islands in Indonesia. They are less likely to cause trouble or engage in sabotage.” More than 70 percent of APRIL’s plantation laborers are migrants. At one camp I visited, f
our hundred Sambas people had just been delivered to the company by gangmasters from across the Straits of Malacca in western Borneo. They were sleeping under plastic on logged land. “They are natural loggers, very hardworking. Thousands come out from a very small area,” one manager said. Why were they living under canvas in the rain, I asked. “It’s their choice. They hate zinc roofs.”

  The Indonesian archipelago is one of the world’s three great tropical forested regions. Its deforestation began in earnest under Suharto. The world now recognizes that he ran a hugely corrupted crony regime. One of the world’s largest and most populous nations was his personal fiefdom, sustained by a rhetoric of nation building and fighting communism. He rewarded his family, friends, and generals with huge concessions in the state forest. If you had the support of the president, and the required muscle to subdue the locals, you could take whatever land you wanted. If you required labor, Suharto could supply it. He revived and expanded an old Dutch colonial strategy known as the transmigration program that shipped thousands of people out from densely populated islands like Java to distant jungles. But for most of his thirty-two-year rule, from 1967 to 1998, Suharto had the staunch support of the West as a bulwark against communism.

  The customary land rights of the country’s rain-forest-dwelling majority, known as adat, were recognized in Indonesian law. But they were superseded by the nationalization of the forests, and rendered defunct if they conflicted with development projects of national importance, whether logging, mining, or plantation agriculture. Land grabbers ruled in the jungle. As Suharto put it, “nomadic farming should be terminated.”