Winrock International is helping restore Indonesia’s peatland in a way that will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, slow land subsidence, combat the threat of fire, and support the tens of thousands of people who live and work there. I recently returned from a trip to Indonesia, where obstacles — and opportunities — are both in full view.

Michael Netzer, GIS and Remote Sensing Carbon Analyst at Winrock International

A land of oil palm, acacia and peat

From a small rise in elevation the Kampar Peninsula spreads before us, dominated by row upon row of oil palm trees. Beyond the horizon stretch plantations of acacia trees, feeding one of the largest pulp and paper industries in the world. Decades ago, a vast wetland forest covered this land, located about 85 miles west of Singapore on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Known as peatland, the forest grows atop a thick layer of spongy peat moss, which formed over tens of thousands of years as organic matter accumulated without decomposing in the marshy, coastal conditions.

Today, the 700,000 remaining hectares of peatland in the Kampar are draped over the mineral soil as deep as 10 meters in many areas. These peatlands, however, are threatened by the expansion of the oil palm and acacia plantations that now cover over 70 percent of the landscape — the result of cheap available land, corporate and economic interests, large government incentives, and corruption that allowed large areas of land to be granted by local leaders to the highest bidder.

Oil palm and acacia threaten the natural peatland because these crops are not native to wetland environments and therefore require extensive ditching and draining of the peatland. When peatland is drained, the land shrinks and subsides — a process that threatens almost half of the current production land in the Kampar with collapse in the next 50 years. It also dries out the top few meters of peat, accelerates its decomposition, and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Once these waterlogged soils dry out, they then become susceptible to fires that on dry years can become catastrophic.

The collapse of peatlands due to subsidence exacerbated by fires leaves only two options for Indonesia: restore the peatland through rewetting and finding alternative wetland tolerant production systems — or continue as usual until the collapse of both the ecosystem and the socioeconomic systems it supports.

Much of Indonesia’s peatland has been cleared to make way for oil palm and acacia plantations. Photo By Michael Netzer.

The situation is complex. The oil palm and acacia pulp and paper industries support the livelihoods of most of the smallholder farmers and constitute a large economy that the government relies on. Yet fire and land subsidence threaten these systems, and local and national governments are now keenly aware that alternatives to current peatland management need to be found. The question becomes, can these peatlands be rewetted and restored, and can the remaining wetland forest be protected without destroying the local economy? The answer to that question is critical to the future of Indonesia’s 14.9 million hectares of peatland, which accounts for a staggering 36 percent of the world’s tropical peatland. And that’s the question we have set out to investigate.

‘My Forest, My Breath’

As we drive east, we spot a plume of smoke from a fire. One of my local colleagues says it has been burning for a few days — a big fire for the wet season. After we move on, I overhear him calling the local authorities. Since the fires of 2015, the local government has initiated a number of programs to combat fire, including citizen alert systems like the one he is calling.

We’re going to a “Hutan Desa” (village forest), an area of forest that has been granted to the local villages as part of a government program meant to increase local authority of the land and foster better environmental stewardship. My motorbike guide puts on a dust mask that reads “Hutanku Napasku” or “My Forest, My Breath,” demonstrating the degree to which people in this region value forests.

Our motorbike guide dons a dust mask reading “Hutanku Napasku” or “My Forest, My Breath.” Photo By Michael Netzer.

On our way to the forest we pass a large, desolate clearing where an illegal oil palm plantation is in the initial stages of development. Where a wetland forest once stood there are now a series of large canals, still being dug by backhoe, and neat lines of oil palm seedlings planted among fallen logs. The wetland soil is now dry from draining.

This type of development is prohibited under Indonesian law passed after the fires of 2015. My guide explains that his village made a formal complaint to local authorities when they learned about the concession development, but the complaint clearly was not enough to stop it. These concessions only provide low-paying labor, he says, and his village is far more worried about the threat of fire. Despite changing policies and some encouraging national trends regarding peatland protection, this plantation is a stark reminder of how the push for development is always ready to continue its march forward.

However, oil palm is not the only culprit. Acacia trees that feed the massive pulp and paper mills to the south also drive land conversion and peatland forest loss. Acacia plantations account for over 70 percent of all the plantation land in the Kampar. These non-native trees grow quickly but require deep and well-organized drainage systems, which have caused some of the worst environmental impacts in the peninsula. Despite sustainability commitments from the pulp and paper industry, very little has been done, and around 35 percent of the acacia land is projected to collapse in the next 50 years.

There is an alternative to this plantation model. Fast-growing, wetland-tolerant trees species like mahang (Macaranga pruinosa) and geronggang (Cratoxylum arborescens) are economically viable and could replace acacia. The challenge is that even fast-growing wetland species grow at about half the rate of acacia, an unfortunate biophysical reality for the anaerobic nature of wetlands — and this modest loss in short-term profits is hard for the pulp and paper industry to accept even if it means long-term gains.

When I mention this perplexing lack of business forethought to local experts, most shrug in a resigned way. They remind me that in Indonesia the companies do not actually own the land, leasing it from the government instead for 50 to 100 years. By then, many of the leases will expire, and the companies will move on, leaving the cost and the damages to the local people and the government.

We reach the forest edge, park our bikes and begin to hack our way along an overgrown forest path. The forest canopy provides thankful refuge from the sun. Under a thick layer of leaflitter, the soil becomes spongy and our boots sometimes break through the top layer into the wet underneath.

We make our way into the peatland forest, which provides local communities with many sustainable products. Photo By Michael Netzer.

This forest does indeed provide the local communities with sustenance — or “breath.”  Our guide points out edible durian fruit growing from the canopy trees, and a type of guava called punak that provides a sweet and sour snack as we hike. We also munch on a small bitter leaf that apparently gives you energy while hiking. The forest also provides a number of economically valuable species, including sago palm (Metroxylon sagu), which produces large amounts of tasty starch that is commonly used in Southeast Asian noodles and breads; jelutong (Dyera costulata), a latex-producing tree that produces a high-quality food grade rubber; and nipa palm (Nypa fruticans), which produces light sugar that is not uncommon in Asian markets.

The canals and bits of open water in these remnant natural forests abound with small fish that provide a staple food source and small livelihood for local communities. Fishing was the traditional livelihood of the indigenous peoples of these peatlands. But as the natural forests peel away so do the fish, due to high water temperatures in the exposed canals and frequent fluctuations in water level. The sustenance opportunities supplied by the forest could be established without draining the peatland, all of which could help reestablish a more traditional, integrated and profitable lifestyle for the local people.

Seeking a solution to peatland forest degradation

Together with a number of local NGOS and the local government, Winrock has been developing demonstration plots and building capacity of the local community to re-wet the drained land and grow wetland-tolerant crops. Called paludiculture, these wetland cropping systems present a win-win approach for the region. However, there are challenges with paludiculture. Most local communities lack the resources to either adequately re-wet and restore the peatlands that have been drained, or to know what types of different crops or commodities could be grown on the re-wetted peat.

Winrock demonstration plots for paludiculture offer an alternative to the peatland degradation caused by oil palm and acacia plantations. Photo By Michael Netzer.

This is where Winrock comes in. Paludiculture allows for the restoration of the peatland, and in turn combats fire, land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions while providing an economically viable alternative income for local people. In these small garden plots, annual crops like pineapple and chili pepper are being planted that can provide the local community with short-term profits. Intercropped with the annuals are longer-term perennials like sago and jelutong. Once mature, these crops have the potential to replace oil palm as the primary income for these local communities. And on the fringes of the demonstration plots grow mahang and geronggang trees. Not just an alternative to the pulp and paper industry, these trees can also serve as a wood-energy crop for markets in Japan and South Korea.

Based on Winrock’s research, these paludiculture perennial crops have the potential, if developed appropriately, to scale into large commodities generating higher profits per hectare than oil palm for the local community.

A truck rumbles through the cleared peatland. Photo By Michael Netzer.

As a reminder of the challenge before us, a procession of trucks loaded with acacia rumble by the demonstration plot. They’re heading to the nearby dock on the Siak River, where they will be loaded onto boats and transported to a local mill. In a sense the trucks symbolize one possible future for this area, one in which the peatland is doomed to collapse. These paludiculture cropping systems offer a different future, replacing business-as-usual with a sustainable, economically viable alternative that restores the ecosystem services that once protected this fragile peatland.

If you have ever been part of designing and implementing a large event you will recognize the need to start well in advance. In our case we started planning the Wallace Center’s fifth National Good Food Network (NGFN) conference — an important biannual networking and programming event — 18 months ahead of time.  We lined up over 40 breakout sessions, five plenaries with 20 panelists, 10 pre-conference trainings and local site visits — and we registered almost 500 people for the event, which was held in New Orleans March 10 ­­– 13. Little did we know that our timeline was to intersect with that of COVID-19.

Perhaps prophetically, we designed NGFN 2020 to recognize that we are at a pivotal moment in food systems change; that after years of seeking to shift the food system to be more healthy, green and equitable, those of us involved in this work would be well served to take stock of where we  have made progress and where haven’t, examine what is working and what is not, and honestly look at who is being left out.  Despite our collective years of work and the gains we have made, there is still a long way to go, which calls on us to be more strategic, collaborative and collective in our approach. Our stated theme and guiding light was “A More Just Vision: Collaborating on the Future of Good Food.”  Now that we are weeks into this global pandemic, it’s clear that we are indeed at a pivotal moment in how we feed ourselves — and a more just vision is what we desperately need.

While in New Orleans for NGFN 2020, we felt the tremors of how business as usual was quickly changing. Although there was no quarantine at the time, dozens of speakers and many funders and public sector allies were grounded with non-essential travel bans. Members of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service,  a leading conference sponsor, were encouraged not to travel, yet they showed up in force and told participants that the work we were doing together at the conference was “mission critical” and they needed to be there.  Those who manage regional food hubs and processing centers, especially those with significant sales to schools, universities and other food service accounts, had begun to receive notice of canceled orders. They were tasked with calling their farmers to inform them of these disruptions and working with them to find alternative markets. They had to grapple with the overnight loss of 30 to 50 percent of sales and its effect on employees, suppliers and community.

During the conference, over 50 participants swiftly convened in an emergency session to try to make sense of this in real time, to help each other think through how to respond back home and how to catalyze action. The group drafted a call to action to government, philanthropy, companies and others to quickly address the needs of households, farmers, farm workers and small food businesses.  Following the conference, the Wallace Center created a COVID-19 Response Group Listserv, which is connecting over 700 food and farm advocates and conference participants to identify and share innovations and needs as everyone quickly transitions to a new reality.

Currently we are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation and leadership among good food value chain organizations. For example, the Common Market in Philadelphia, which lost a large part of their sales as schools and universities closed, is now adding to their employee roster after being contracted by the City of New York to pack and deliver 3,000 boxes a day of regionally sourced foods for emergency relief. 4P Foods in Virginia has stepped into a regional coordination role utilizing the knowledge and infrastructure of 14 food hubs up and down the East Coast to address food insecurity while steering philanthropic funds into local procurement by connecting farmers to food access points and markets. In New Orleans, a diverse group of leading food systems organizations including Market Umbrella, Recirculating Farms Coalition, SPROUT NOLA, Liberty’s Kitchen and the New Orleans Food Policy Advisory Committee teamed up with community-based distributor Top Box Foods Louisiana to rapidly co-create a multi-farm community-supported-agriculture box for home delivery. Within one week of the city’s stay-in-place order they were distributing hundreds of boxes weekly to community members. Examples like these are popping up all over the country, proving the resilience of local and regional food systems.

This pandemic is showing us that we need a food system capable of responding to a crisis that cripples core links in the supply chain. Various parts of the conventional food system are cracking or breaking down; millions of low-income Americans of all backgrounds rely on the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the emergency food systems, both of which are constrained by social distancing measures, increased demand, and arcane rules that inhibit adaptation. The current situation is revealing what many have been saying for a long time — that systemic racism has made communities of color more vulnerable to shocks to our basic systems, including shocks to the food system. Most essential workers in agriculture, slaughterhouses, meat packing plants, food service and restaurants are indigenous, black, brown and other people of color working for low wages with no benefits, leaving them with few resources to ride the crises out. Immigrant farmworkers and food chain workers are especially vulnerable, as they have no access to a social safety net.

Two years ago, our team at the Wallace Center committed to center racial equity in our work, and for NGFN 2020 we took this commitment seriously. Starting with a large and diverse conference advisory committee, we set out to elevate and amplify all voices to ensure that the conference reflected the entirety of the good food movement. We were extremely intentional about inviting people of color to speak on plenary panels, about prioritizing breakouts sessions that directly address issues of structural racism in the food system and providing travel scholarships for people from frontline communities who would otherwise not be able to attend.  As a result, 67 percent of plenary speakers and a growing number of conference attendees identified as people of color, and 62 percent of participants were joining us for the first time, indicating that we are expanding our audience. We view this as a significant step toward centering racial equity at the Wallace Center. Check out this short video made from footage at the conference.

If there was ever a time to expand the fundamental goals of our food system to include resilience and equity, this is it. Federal funds via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act and other vehicles should put in place resiliency plans and ensure procurement practices and safety nets that support more place-based food and farming systems that provide healthy and affordable food, cost-of-living jobs, and wealth creation opportunities in communities across America. There is a very real danger that we emerge from this crisis with an even more consolidated food system that trades resilience and community health and wealth for one that continues to push people on the margin off the edge. Establishing thriving regional food and farming systems begins with reducing barriers to entry for farming, requiring use of regenerative production practices, and investing in innovation and infrastructure for handling, processing and distributing food through a diversity of market channels. These are righteous steps along the path toward “A More Just Vision: Collaborating on the Future of Good Food” — and the Wallace Center is committed to taking them.