12 March 22
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The oil and gas industry won’t increase production because it’s enjoying the profits from high prices.
It’s a rallying cry that makes no sense. On top of the fact that there’s no such thing as an “immediate” increase in oil and gas production, if anything this crisis is one more reason to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. And in the meantime, since the industry is going to blame the government for everything anyway, a little intervention would actually be helpful here, not to help the oil and gas companies but to rein them in and actually help the American public.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an embargo on exporting oil to the U.S. due to its support of Israel in the war. The result was rationing, miles-long lines at gas stations, a whole lot of headlines questioning our dependency on foreign oil, and ultimately a huge boom in energy efficiency and non-fossil energy in the U.S. The oil industry, of course, claimed that the shortages were all the government’s fault for refusing to let them drill more in the years preceding the embargo.
In 2012, when it was already clear that the fracking boom was headed for a bust, the fossil fuel lobby began pushing hard to lift the ban on exporting American oil and gas. The policy had been in place since that 1970s oil crisis in an effort to insulate Americans from the volatility of the global energy market. But suddenly, exporting was the industry’s last hope to maybe turn a profit on fracking, so the math changed. The story they told was one of national security and energy independence, a return to global superpower status. Their efforts paid off in 2015 when President Barack Obama lifted the ban.
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he became the most fossil fuel-backed president in U.S. history, an honor previously held by George W. Bush — and again the industry insisted it needed more land, fewer regulations, and more drilling. Under Trump the goal became not just “energy independence” but “energy dominance.” When Covid hit and the industry was suddenly sitting on mountains of oil barrels worth less than nothing, they seized on the opportunity to request further deregulation. Trump was only too happy to comply. In tracking the fossil fuel-requested subsidies, loopholes, and regulatory rollbacks during the Covid-19 pandemic, I counted well over 100, the vast majority of which remain in place. In fact, prior to leaving office, Trump tried to make as many of them as permanent as possible via executive order. Between those rollbacks and the lifting of the export ban, the oil and gas industry currently has more freedom to drill than it’s had since regulation began.
There are two important things to remember about how oil and gas production work: The government doesn’t place any production limits on oil and gas companies, and there’s no such thing as an immediate production increase. Oil and gas companies decide, all by themselves, whether or not to increase production, and new drilling now generally translates to oil and gas on the market in six to 12 months. A new fracking well takes six to eight months to produce oil, for example. Are there idle wells that could be productive again in less time? Sure. Are there some that were shut down during the pandemic that can be brought back online? Yep. But then we get to the real reasons oil companies aren’t drilling: It’s not government intervention, it’s a combination of money, labor, and materials (shocking, I know).
Like every other industry during the pandemic, the fossil fuel industry was hit by material and labor shortages. Except in the fossil fuel industry’s case, the labor shortage has been coming for a long time; recruitment and retention are hard when you’re in a dying industry. It was so bad last year that ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods even floated the idea of pay raises, in a pandemic economy!
But even if labor were not a concern and the government threw all its resources into solving the industry’s material shortage problem, oil and gas executives don’t want to increase production because the high prices are working for them financially at the moment. They’ve said so explicitly, out loud and in public.
The big fracking companies — Devon, Pioneer, and Continental — burned by multiple boom and bust cycles over the years, pledged in February not to increase production until 2023. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield said during a Bloomberg Television interview. “If the president wants us to grow, I just don’t think the industry can grow anyway.”
In ExxonMobil’s February earnings call, Woods said the company’s focus remains on price per barrel over volume. “One of the primary objectives we’ve had in looking at the portfolio is less about volume and volume targets and more about the quality and profitability of the barrels that we’re producing.” he said. “That’s been the focus. And as we move forward, we’ll continue — you’ll continue to see the quality of the barrels or profitability of the barrels increase.”
According to Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, what’s even more unusual than the industry’s hesitancy to drill, given the high prices per barrel, is the fact that they’re not buying up new land.
“Typically the price spike would occur and rather than pay dividends as robustly as they are paying now, they would buy up other assets and maybe increase production,” he said. “What’s happening now is not typical. They’re not buying up other assets, and they’re not drilling. What does that mean for the future? It’s hard to say. It’s possible they’re just biding their time, building confidence amongst investors and will increase production next year, but this is definitely not the typical response to a price spike.”
Instead, they’re banking that money, using it to make up for profits lost in the pandemic and mostly to conduct massive stock buybacks that keep their shareholders happy and might just bring investors back to fossil fuel for one more round.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room: the United States’s supposed energy independence. As a net exporter of oil and gas, that’s what the country was promised by industry. But you can’t have independence if you are ruled entirely by global commodity markets. The other big oil-exporting countries are able to use their production capabilities to protect themselves from sudden price changes because their fossil fuel industries are nationalized. Because the U.S. energy sector is entirely private, we have no such luck. For all the industry’s squawking about federal leases, only 10 percent of U.S. drilling happens on public land, the rest is on private land that the government has zero control over. And, again, there is no government entity overseeing production; it’s left entirely up to companies to produce as much or as little oil as they think will be profitable. The closest we have to a regulatory body on production is the Texas Railroad Commission, but even when oil prices went negative during the pandemic, the commission opted not to impose production limits.
Although Biden floated the idea of reinstating the export ban when he campaigned for president, his Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm took that off the table almost immediately. It hasn’t reemerged in the Russia-Ukraine debates, and U.S. exports helped Europe absorb the sudden cutoff of Russian fuel supplies. But an export ban is not a terrible long-term plan. And since the industry is accusing the government of meddling with production anyway, why not call its bluff and start a real conversation about nationalizing the industry and marching it toward a transition to renewable energy? What we’re seeing now is an entirely unmanaged transition, unfolding in real time. It’s painful, and the future is completely unclear, but none of that has to be true.
Russian soldiers move toward mainland Ukraine on a road near Armiansk, Crimea, Feb. 25. (photo: Shutterstock)
Britain's defense ministry said in an intelligence briefing that Russian forces were around 15 miles from Kyiv's center.
Fighting raged and missile strikes hit outside Kyiv, with Russian forces appearing to make fresh progress in their slow advance on the capital.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he’s open for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Israel ,but only if there is a cease-fire in place.
Zelenskyy said Saturday he told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he would be ready to meet Putin in Jerusalem. Bennett visited Moscow for a meeting with Putin and spoke repeatedly with Zelenskyy and the leaders of France and Germany as he sought to help mediate an end to the war.
Zelenskyy said Bennett informed him about his talks with Putin, adding that he can’t share details.
Putin has ignored numerous previous offers of talks from Zelenskyy.
Speaking at a news conference, Zelenskyy said the Russians could take the Ukrainian capital "only if they kill us all.”
Ground level view of a surface test of a nuclear device. (photo: Alamy)
As a 22-year-old I controlled a warhead that could vaporize a metropolis. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the public is waking up again to the existential dangers of nuclear weapons
On the massive blast door of the launch control center, someone had painted a mural of a Domino’s pizza logo with the macabre caption, “World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less or your next one is free.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, I’ve heard more discussions of nuclear war than I did in the entire nine years that I wore an air force uniform. I’m glad that people are finally discussing the existential dangers of nuclear weapons. There have been more near-misses than the world knows.
Greg Devlin was an airman assigned to an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) team in Arkansas in 1980. One night he responded to a leak in the missile’s fuel tank. A young airman working in an ICBM launch tube had accidentally dropped a socket from his toolkit; the socket fell down the silo, ricocheted, and pierced a hole in the stage-one fuel tank. The missile’s liquid fuel exploded. Devlin was thrown 60ft down an asphalt road and watched as a massive fireball rose overhead.
The ICBM had a nine-megaton warhead – the most powerful single nuclear weapon in American history – on top. When the missile exploded, the warhead was thrown into the woods, disappearing into the night.
“I was stunned and in pain but I knew the nuke hadn’t gone off,” Devlin told me, “because I remembered those stories from Hiroshima where people had been turned into little charcoal briquettes. I was alive. That’s how I knew the nuke didn’t detonate.” Although the nuclear warhead didn’t explode, the accident still claimed the life of one airman and injured 21 others, including Devlin.
When I was training as a nuclear missile operator, my instructor told me the story of what happened in Arkansas that night in 1980. It’s a famous story within the missile community. Stories like these were a way of impressing upon young officers the integrity required to be a good steward of these weapons and a warning of how quickly things can go wrong. That warning was very much on my mind as I began my first “alert” down in the claustrophobic underground missile silo that housed the launch control center.
But somewhere along my way to nearly 300 nuclear “alerts” – 24-hour shifts in command of a launch crew – I began to brush the story off as a scare tactic for rookies. Similarly, I think that after the end of the cold war, the general public allowed the threat of nuclear warfare to recede into the background. The threat simply didn’t feel real to new generations like it did to those who grew up huddling under their desks during nuclear attack drills in elementary school.
And the young crews who steward this nuclear arsenal today aren’t immune from the post-cold war malaise. In 2013, during my first year on crew, 11 ICBM officers were implicated in a drug scandal. The following year, 34 ICBM launch officers were implicated in a cheating scandal on their monthly proficiency exams.
Deborah Lee James, the secretary of the air force at the time, said, “This was a failure of integrity on the part of some of our airmen. It was not a failure of our nuclear mission.”
In this attempt to save face, Secretary James revealed a state of dissonance that every nuclear missile operator lives with. We are told, day in and day out, that our integrity is crucial to the deterrent value of nuclear weapons and helps make the world a safer place. But what man or woman of integrity could possibly launch a nuclear weapon?
As the war in Ukraine is reminding us, life with nuclear weapons is not safer or more peaceful. If you study nuclear warfare, you’ll learn about “megatons” and nuclear yields, stockpiles and budget expenditures. These numbers quantify the enormous danger of nuclear weapons but also, in rendering that danger abstract, obfuscate it.
Greg Devlin has a different set of numbers from his experience with missiles. “Since that explosion I’ve had 13 spine surgeries and two spinal stimulators. I lived the last decade of my life on morphine,” said Devlin.
Nuclear weapons turn the most important parts of life into nothing more than numbers – which is exactly the thought process needed for a society that believes that launching a nuclear missile is a viable solution to conflict. Because in the wake of a nuclear attack there will be no individuals, only numbers.
How else to summarize the revelations that Mark Meadows, the last White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, and his wife voted in the 2020 election using the address of a mobile home in North Carolina where they did not reside? Mr. Meadows, who was eager to promote Mr. Trump’s lies that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, never owned the residence. In fact, he might not have ever set foot in it.
Compare this case with that of Crystal Mason, the Texas resident who was sentenced to five years in prison for submitting an illegal provisional ballot in 2016 while on supervised release for a felony conviction. Ms. Mason, who is Black, maintains that she did not know she was unable to vote and that a poll worker handed her the provisional ballot even though she was not on the state’s voter rolls. “It was to make an example out of me,” Ms. Mason told the American Civil Liberties Union of her prosecution.
Would Ms. Mason have faced such punishment if she had Mr. Meadows’s position? Or his skin color? What “example” — beyond its value as evidence of rank hypocrisy — will be made of his absentee ballot?
For the past year, the Republican Party has gone to great lengths to restrict absentee voting in state legislatures, claiming that mail-in ballots allow nefarious actors to influence the elections. This was always misdirection; fraudulent behavior is extremely rare, and election audits have repeatedly shown that the few cases that do occur do not affect elections. Will Republicans now denounce one of their own for engaging in such activity?
Nor is Mr. Meadows the only Republican practitioner of a double standard. Many Trump officials who have decried mail-in voting have voted, well, through the mail. That includes Mr. Trump, members of his family, Vice President Mike Pence and Attorney General William P. Barr. Remember also that Mr. Trump specifically encouraged voters in the crucial swing state of Florida to vote by mail while simultaneously challenging absentee ballot rules in other states. And while plenty of elected Republicans claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, none saw the same forces at work in their own elections — which appeared on the same ballot.
By now, it should be obvious: “Election integrity” is a hollow slogan for Republicans. They seek stricter voting laws in a haphazard attempt to dampen voter turnout for Democrats — efforts that might end up hurting turnout among their own supporters as well.
The goal of anyone who believes in democracy should be to make it easier for people to have a voice — not adding onerous requirements to vote by mail, tearing down ballot drop boxes and devising mechanisms to wrest away control of elections from local, nonpartisan officials. Republicans have done all of that. These are major transgressions. But smaller ones matter, too, which is why no one should look the other way when a prominent figure in their own party appears to fudge the truth about where he lives on his voter registration form.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“This bill is not about individual freedom,” said a legislator who voted against it. “This is a continuation of a national agenda to whitewash history.”
The Florida Senate passed a bill modeled on an effort Gov. Ron DeSantis called the “Stop WOKE (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act” on a party-line vote Thursday. DeSantis is expected to sign the bill, which he unveiled last December with a speech in which he warped the famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote, about being judged not by the color of your skin but by the content of your character, into an attack on critical race theory (CRT).
The bill, called simply “Individual Freedom,” would prohibit schools and workplaces from using instruction material that teaches, among other things, that a person’s status as “privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.”
An earlier version of the bill would have made it illegal to teach lessons and materials that cause a person to “ feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” The bill was amended last month to narrow the definition to prohibiting lessons that say a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” for systemic racism and sexism—something that’s actually happening in very few classrooms, if at all.
The intent of the bill, however, is clear. Similar to others around the country, it’s aimed at tackling CRT, “critical race theory,” an academic theory about America’s legal system that the right has turned into a bogeyman that’s allowed them to target diversity trainings and school curricula about racism both past and present.
Though the bill doesn’t explicitly name critical race theory, DeSantis has called the concept “state-sanctioned racism.” State Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., a Republican who sponsored the bill and is rumored to be in consideration to become DeSantis’ next education chief, said Thursday that “as the teacher, you should never know my politics. You should never know where I stand on those issues.”
But state Sen. Shevrin Jones, one of many Black Democratic legislators to register vocal opposition to the bill, said the effort was part of a national trend toward “revisionist history.”
“This bill is not about individual freedom,” Jones said Thursday. “This is a continuation of a national agenda to whitewash history all because we don’t want white children to feel uncomfortable about true Black history.”
State Sen. Bobby Powell, a Democrat, repeated several times that America “is indeed the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but noted it was also “the home of the slave.”
“Slavery happened,” Powell said. “Jim Crow happened. George Floyd happened… when you tell the story, tell it all.”
Florida has been busy this week fighting the conservative culture wars. The Senate passed what’s been dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which similarly prohibits discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.
DeSantis has not yet signed the bill, but after the CEO of Disney—the state’s biggest driver of tourism—came out against the bill, the governor said Thursday that his state “won’t allow them to inject transgenderism into kindergarten,” and slammed the company as “woke.”
“You have companies, like at Disney, that are going to say and criticize parents’ rights, they’re going to criticize the fact that we don’t want transgenderism in kindergarten in first grade classrooms,” DeSantis told supporters in Boca Raton, according to Fox News. “And so in Florida, our policies got to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations.”
Catholic faithful participate in a procession to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of the Rev. Ignacio EllacurÃa, five other Jesuit priests and two employees at Central American University in San Salvador. (photo: Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images)
Alfredo Cristiani, who left the country in 2021, is accused of knowing of military plans to massacre six Jesuit priests
Prosecutors allege that Cristiani knew of the military’s plan to eliminate the priests and did nothing to stop them.
On 25 February charges were filed against Cristiani, who was president from 1989 to 1994, and a group of soldiers for alleged involvement in the murders. Cristiani and a former lawmaker, Rodolfo Parker, had been summoned to court on Tuesday, but did not appear.
“There is nothing left but to decree the detention against those persons because they did not appear in court and did not send lawyers,” the court’s resolution said.
Cristiani left El Salvador in 2021 after appearing before a special congressional panel investigating overpayments to former government officials.
When prosecutors reopened the priests’ case, his daughter, Claudia Cristiani, published some photos of her father and said they were in the land of the grandfather, meaning Italy, but it was unknown if he is still there.
In a statement released by his daughter, the former leader denied the allegations.
“The truth is I never knew of the plans they had to commit those killings,” Cristiani said. “They never informed me nor asked for my authorization because they knew that I would never have authorized that that Father [Ignacio] EllacurÃa or his brothers were harmed.”
El Salvador’s attorney general’s office has accused Cristiani, Parker and a number of former high-ranking military officers of being behind the murders. A general amnesty passed in 1993 during Cristiani’s administration had prevented pursuit of those involved in war crimes until it was repealed in 2016.
On 16 November 1989 an elite commando unit killed the six priests – five Spaniards and one Salvadoran – along with their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s daughter in the priests’ residence. The killers tried to make the massacre appear as though it had been carried out by leftist guerrillas.
Nine members of the military were initially put on trial, but a court absolved seven of them. Two officers served short sentences but were released in 1993 under the amnesty.
After the supreme court found the amnesty unconstitutional, a judge ordered one of those officers, Col Guillermo Benavides, back to prison where he remains.
While the case stalled at home, a Spanish court in 2020 sentenced former Salvadoran Col Inocente Orlando Montano to 133 years for the priests’ killings.
"For years, people have settled illegally in national parks around Indonesia, clearing the land and farming it in the hope they will eventually be granted legal title to it." (photo: Conservation Atlas)
Suwardi, a 51-year-old from Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, used to work as a laborer for a landlord who managed oil palm and rubber plantations in his home village of Harapan Maju, near Gunung Leuser National Park. He also cultivated a dream: to own his own farmland.
The land lay inside the national park, but Suwardi saw that as only a minor hitch. Like other protected areas in the Southeast Asian country, this one was full of squatters, and with the man’s assurances Suwardi believed that even if he operated illegally for a while, he could one day obtain title to the land.
Soon, however, Suwardi came to regret his deal with a member of what he called a “land mafia,” a common expression in Indonesia for people who fraudulently exploit gaps in the land regulation system for profit, often through collusion with public officials. After two years of hiding from forest rangers, he decided to call it quits.
“I don’t want to be illegal anymore,” Suwardi remembers telling the other encroachers who condemned him for abandoning their group.
Suwardi may have turned his back on his fellow squatters, but he never said goodbye to his farmland, located in the Besitang area of North Sumatra province. Instead, he joined a government program that allows him to manage the land under certain conditions, even if it means he’s had to let go of his dream of one day owning it.
The program, known as “conservation partnership,” seeks to reduce conflict between conservation authorities and villagers living in the vicinity of protected areas, turning them into allies in restoring damaged ecosystems and offering them economic opportunities.
Since its establishment in 2018 by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the program has grown to encompass nearly 177,000 hectares (440,000 acres) of land at 69 sites across the Indonesian archipelago, including some of its best-known national parks, such as Tesso Nilo in Sumatra, East Kutai on the island of Borneo, Lore Lindu on the island of Sulawesi, and Halimun Salak on Java Island, according to Wiratno, the main official overseeing the program.
“Encroachment caused by poverty, lack of agricultural land and landless farmers must be resolved not through law enforcement but through the provision of management access,” Wiratno, the environment ministry’s director-general of conservation, told Mongabay.
Indonesia is home to the world’s third-largest area of rainforest, but it also has one of the highest rates of forest loss since the turn of the century.
Much of that deforestation has occurred illegally, within areas the government has designated as protected. Nearly a tenth of the country’s 22.1 million hectares (54.6 million acres) of “conservation forest” had been damaged as of 2012, Wiratno wrote in a memoir published that year about his time serving as head of Gunung Leuser, which he led from 2005-2007.
The forest in some protected areas has been almost entirely destroyed. Some three-quarters of Tesso Nilo National Park, for example, has been converted into illegal oil palm farms, according to WWF.
Gunung Leuser hasn’t fallen into such dismal straits, though the park hasn’t gone unscathed either. In recent decades, Gunung Leuser, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that’s home to orangutans, elephants, tigers and other endangered species, has lost rainforest across nearly 5% of its total area, much of it converted into illegal farms, according to the park’s management agency.
Efforts to crack down on so-called land mafia practices in Besitang, where the squatters are concentrated, have met with resistance. A 2011 eviction attempt resulted in a group of squatters setting fire to the park authority’s office there, according to a 2016 report by UNESCO and Tropenbos International Indonesia, an international nonprofit.
“The case of Besitang … reflects the experience of encroachment in other conservation areas,” Wiratno told Mongabay.
While illegal attempts to control protected lands are diverse, officials in North Sumatra say that in Besitang, land traffickers have staked claims to national parkland based on the presumption that it belonged to the Langkat Sultanate during the Dutch colonial period and therefore today belongs to the sultan’s descendants.
“These so-called geran datuk claims have for a long time led to the occupation of Leuser by land grabbers,” Selamat Indarjo, the official in charge of the park’s Besitang region, told Mongabay. “The claim has no basis, but many farmers believe it.”
The current sultan of Langkat expressed a similar view during a speech at the 2018 Conservation Forest Farmers Congress held in Besitang to kick off the conservation partnership program there.
“I’ve never heard of the term ‘geran datuk,’ but it’s been used to make a fool of people,” said Azwar Abdul Jalil Rahmad Shah al-Haj, the 14th sultan since the sultanate was established in 1568.
Also fueling the deforestation in Leuser, which straddles the administrative provinces of North Sumatra and Aceh, was a rebellion waged by separatists in the latter province from 1976-2005. The conflict pushed thousands of refugees into the national park, where many still remain.
At times, the refugee issue has been used as a cover for land mafia practices, according to Wiratno.
Land traffickers like those in Leuser often have connections in high places, making them exceptionally difficult to deal with. In Besitang, they typically operate by clearing forestland and then selling small plots to aspiring farmers like Suwardi.
After getting the land, Suwardi and dozens of other farmers formed a group they hoped would help them eventually obtain legal title to the land, an asset they could one day pass on to their children. They planted oil palm and rubber trees, cash crops that take several years to begin producing palm fruit and latex. Suwardi was one of the “front men” of the group, he said, which didn’t make it any easier for him to leave.
“They used to be my friends, but now they hate me,” Suwardi said. “They consider me a traitor.”
The conservation partnership program in Besitang currently spans 1,526 hectares (3,771 acres), including Suwardi’s 2-hectare (5-acre) plot.
Prior to joining the government-sanctioned “forest farmer group,” Suwardi and other squatters had to sign an agreement stating that the lands they were managing lie inside a national park and cannot be owned by individuals.
“Participating in the forest farmer group means admitting that the land they used to cultivate belongs to a national park,” said Masrizal Saraan, executive director of the Petai Foundation, an Indonesian NGO that helps run the conservation partnership program in Leuser.
Other participating NGOs are the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the country’s largest environmental advocacy group, and the Orangutan Information Center, based in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province.
Some of the funds for the program come from Tropical Forest Conservation Action for Sumatra, a debt-for-nature swap scheme created by the U.S. and Indonesian governments. Debt-for-nature swaps allow portions of a country’s foreign debt to be forgiven in exchange for investing the money in conservation.
“If this program is oriented toward ecosystem restoration, I think it will be very good because it involves the community/farmers who have already been working in the Leuser area,” Panut Hadisiswoyo, the founder and director of the Orangutan Information Center, told Mongabay. “The approach is more humane because farmers can simultaneously receive economic opportunities by giving them access to plant secondary crops while restoring the area.”
The program is also intended to help meet Indonesia’s ambitious goals of redistributing 12.7 million hectares (31.4 million acres) of land within forest areas to local communities under the government’s “social forestry” program and reforesting millions of hectares.
While participating farmers are allowed to cultivate “traditional” crops and harvest non-timber forest products, such as rattan, beeswax, honey, and mushrooms, they are not allowed to grow rubber and oil palm, and are expected to cut down any that they have planted.
Some farmers, like Joneri, a father of three who began squatting in the park in 2014, have cut down their oil palms.
“I imagine that in the years to come, if all former encroachers replace oil palm plantations with hardwood plantations, this area will recover,” he told Mongabay.
Others are more reluctant to fell what they have planted. Groups like Petai have cut down illegal oil palms in some places, but it can be expensive for a local NGO to hire the workers required to do the job.
Suwardi has cut down some of his oil palms, but a few still stand on his farm. He planted them four years ago when he first started working the land, and they have recently started bearing fruit. The proceeds, he says, go a long way toward paying his children’s school fees; one of them is in university.
“If others cut theirs down, I’ll cut mine down too,” he said.
Even if Suwardi had to let go of his dream of owning the land, he said the most important thing now is being able to get the income from agriculture to support his family. He has planted nearly 1,000 forest trees such as durian, matoa and petai, and in the vicinity he can plant secondary crops, such as chilis, watermelons and oranges, to bolster the family’s income.
“I have a family and daughters who now need my support to [finish] their education,” he said. “I work to make money, not to have land.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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