By Sara Webb
MERAK, Indonesia, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Indonesia’s rust-bucket ferries are a symbol of the decrepit infrastructure which has plagued Southeast Asia’s biggest economy and prevented it from matching China’s meteoric growth rate.
Delivering a truckload of goods across one of the biggest of the 17,000 islands in Indonesia’s archipelago can take a week, when a journey of the same distance might take a day in Europe or the United States.
At Merak, a busy port on the western tip of Java island, lorries loaded with coffee, sugar and fruit from the island of Sumatra drive off a rusty ferry. Trucks carrying brand new motorbikes take their place for the three-hour ferry ride across choppy seas to southern Sumatra.
When the ferry docks in resource-rich Sumatra, some of the trucks must then navigate their way through narrow, dirt roads over mountains and through forests to Banda Aceh in the north. The 1,600 km journey might take close to a week.
From the island of Sabang in the west to Merauke in the east, Indonesia spans over 5,000 km, or roughly the distance from Anchorage, Alaska to New York City. Indonesia is heavily dependent on ferries for transport between its islands.
Yet years of neglect and a lack of funding in the wake of the Asian financial crisis mean that much of Indonesia’s infrastructure needs to be modernised or expanded.
“Infrastructure is key to Indonesia’s success,” says Edwin Soeryadjaya, whose firm Saratoga Capital has invested in a section of the Trans-Java tollroad, an ambitious project that will stretch over 1,000 km from one end of Java to the other by the time it is completed in 2010.
New infrastructure could help Indonesia’s growth rate spurt from 6.3 percent in 2007 to as much as 8 percent, said Bill Belchere, a Hong Kong-based economist at Macquarie Securities.
In parts of Java where better infrastructure has been built, there are obvious economic benefits such as jobs and tourism. At weekends, Jakartans flock to the once-sleepy hill city of Bandung as a new tollroad has cut travel time in half to two hours, leading to brisk business for hotels and shopping malls there.
DISASTERS
Transport Minister Jusman Syafi’i Djamal estimates Indonesia needs a minimum investment of about 25 trillion rupiah ($2.67 billion) a year for the next decade to overhaul its transport.
“We want to improve and modernise all the infrastructure, to improve trains, ships, aviation and land transport,” he told Reuters in an interview late last year.
Djamal, who was previously with the National Transportation and Security Evaluation body, has one of the toughest jobs in the cabinet — improving the reputation of a transport system that has become a byword for disasters.
A string of fatal accidents, many caused by bad weather, poor maintenance, or sloppy practices, cost Djamal’s predecessor the transport job and prompted the European Union to ban all 51 Indonesian airlines from its airspace on safety grounds.
An Adam Air airplane disappeared into the sea a year ago with 102 passengers and crew on board, while a Garuda Indonesia plane crashed at Yogyakarta airport in March, killing 21 people, after the pilot ignored 15 warnings and descended too rapidly.
Djamal says Indonesia has responded with improvements such as plans to buy new planes and better safety practices, and it hopes to get the ban overturned in the next few months.
But he still has plenty of work to do on the railways, roads and ferries. A few months ago, he ordered 10 of the 24 ferries at Merak to be taken out of service and repaired, causing disruptions and long tailbacks at the port.
“People were angry with me because suddenly there were traffic jams,” said Djamal, “but safety and security is the first priority.”
Even so, some accidents are beyond his control, he says.
In October, a ferry capsized off Sulawesi when passengers rushed to the upper deck to get a mobile phone signal from a nearby transmitter: a local radio station had offered a free car to the first person to call in and the passengers wanted to try their luck. Police said at least 30 people died.
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS
With foreign direct investment in Indonesia bouncing back, analysts say it should be easy to attract funding.
“The issue is not the funding, the issue is the spending, and the ability of central and local governments to implement these plans,” said Fauzi Ichsan, an economist at Standard Chartered.
“Land clearance is the biggest hurdle, because no one has the power to make land clearance for these projects compulsory. This can be done under a more authoritarian government, but this is the price of democracy.”
The engineering feats involved are a further challenge. Much of Indonesia’s terrain, particularly in resource-rich areas, is mountainous, heavily forested, or at risk from landslides, floods, and seismic activity, which makes construction difficult.
So while there’s talk of building a bridge across the Sunda Strait to connect Java and Sumatra and replace the existing antiquated ferries, the $10 billion project is controversial.
This part of the archipelago suffers frequent earthquakes and is close to Anak Krakatau, an active volcano which burst into life again just weeks after the two local governments backing the project decided to push ahead with a feasibility study.
Transport Minister Djamal said that his priorities are to fix the railways, provide ferry services to link the easternmost islands, and build new airports in Papua which is difficult to cross by land.
In Sumatra, he wants to cut travel from one end of the island to the other from days to five hours using a high-speed train.
While many investors worried about China’s massive spending on infrastructure projects in the 1990s, the investment paid off and laid the foundation for very strong growth, analysts say.
“In Indonesia, a lot of local manufacturers have trouble moving things about the country, which leads to higher inflation,” said Belchere, from Macquarie Securities. “You limit your ability to hit a 7 to 8 percent growth rate if you don’t get ahead of these bottlenecks.”
(Additional reporting by Telly Nathalia, Ahmad Pathoni, and Harry Suhartono; editing by Megan Goldin)
Source: http://www.reuters.com/
January 14th, 2008
Organic farming takes root in post-bomb Bali
Graeme MacRae
In the 1990s, the tourism industry in Bali boomed. Many Balinese became rich during this period. But farmers, the traditional upholders of the Balinese economy, became poorer. Costs of agricultural production and the cost of living went up, and the price of agricultural products, especially rice, rose very little. Farmers turned to other work, usually in tourism-related sectors, to make a living. Farmland was converted to other (usually tourism-related) uses. Young people were more attracted to the glamorous prospects offered by tourism than the hard work, dirty clothes and poor pay of farming.
The bombs in Kuta in October 2002 were not the end of tourism, but they were the beginning of the end of the fantasy, blindly held through the boom-years, that tourism was a sustainable long-term base for the Balinese economy. In the wake of the bomb, some advocated a more diversified and sustainable economic base. Many realised that agriculture had been forgotten - or at least marginalised - and that it should perhaps be reinstated at the centre of Balinese culture and economy. Some policy makers suggested developing ‘agro-industri’ and ‘agri-bisnis’ to compete in the global market.
Alternative voices
Amidst the hubbub of support for large-scale industrialisation of agriculture, there were also smaller voices talking about alternative approaches to agricultural development: returning to traditional crops, locally-based sustainable development, agri- and/or eco-tourism and organic production. Apart from the obvious health and environmental reasons, the logic was that such methods could lower production costs and produce potentially more valuable crops.
Since the second bombing in 2005, tourism numbers have slowly returned to something resembling pre-bomb levels. The memories have faded, the tourism fantasy has gradually reasserted itself, and a real post-tourism economy has yet to take shape. Some seeds of it have been sown though, mostly in the form of enterprises that feed off or into tourism in various ways: a shift from providing tourism facilities to longer-term expatriate and business accommodation, meeting and conference facilities, international hospitals and health centres. The smart operators, the big players, have quietly moved at least some of their investment out of tourism into real estate, or anything less vulnerable than tourism.
Earlier this decade it seemed rice-farming might die out altogether in Bali
At the same time, somewhat less spectacularly, the agriculture sector has begun to transform itself, from the production of rice and subsidiary crops for subsistence, to a growing emphasis on cash crops. While some of the problems of Balinese agriculture have been exacerbated by tourism-driven prosperity and cultural modernisation, tourism has also provided new opportunities for agriculture, including a growing range of niche markets for premium and healthy foods for hotels, restaurants and the expatriate community.
Organic (or at least chemical-free) production has a potential double advantage: reducing the cash production costs for fertilizers and pesticides, plus producing a higher-cost product for this premium market. Several expatriate land-owners began growing organic food for their own families, but also as examples they hoped their neighbouring farmers might follow. Market gardeners in the mountains were quick to see these opportunities and many of them have converted to more or less organic production methods, to lower production costs as well as increasing the value of their crops.
But rice-farmers were not so quick to change. They tended to see all the reasons organic crops might fail, they felt that whole subaks (irrigation cooperatives) needed to change together and were not confident about marketing their produce. Earlier this decade, around 2003, it seemed that rice-farming might have to die out before anything changed. But since then something has changed. Here are three examples:
Growing rice differently
Prana Dewi Resort is a yoga and health retreat on the slopes of Mt. Batu Karu in the southwest of Bali. It was developed on the family land of a local man married to a German woman. They needed to feed their guests and they wanted to provide healthy, chemical-free food with a local flavour. In 1998, they began growing traditional rice varieties and reducing their use of synthetic fertilizers. They now produce at higher levels than previously. Neighbouring farmers have begun following their example and they have now formed a group for joint marketing of their produce. What began as a specialist tourism enterprise has expanded to become a wider movement of agricultural and economic change.
In the next valley is Wangaya Betan, where in 2005, a small group of farmers, guided by an innovative government agricultural scientist, began converting their wastes from rice, chicken, coffee and cocoa production into feed for cattle. They composted the manure to produce organic fertiliser and substituted it progressively for synthetic fertilisers over three planting seasons. They also began using an improved system of seed selection, raising and planting, known as SRI (System of Rice Intensification).
Their yields improved immediately while their production costs reduced dramatically. Since then virtually the whole subak has followed them and neighbouring subaks have begun to change also. They obtained a government grant to establish a training centre and now they are training farmers from elsewhere in Bali and Indonesia.
In Payangan, on the outskirts of the tourism centre of Ubud, two unusual men are introducing organic methods to local farmers. Wayan Kubu is a government agricultural extension officer employed to provide advice and expert knowledge to farmers. He attended permaculture courses run by IDEP, an NGO in Ubud, and was sufficiently impressed that he began telling farmers about them.
Nyoman Sanjaya is the head (pekaseh) of a local subak. He spent many years working in Jakarta and when he returned home he wanted to return also to farming. He bought some land, established a rice-mill, and when he was elected as pekaseh he immediately began mobilising subak members to repair their run-down irrigation system.
The new projects involve post-tourism visions of what economic development can be
When he heard about SRI from Pak Kubu he decided to try it on his own fields. His yield immediately increased from 6 tonnes to 8 tonnes per hectare. As in the other projects, his neighbours began to follow and now one third of the subak are using SRI. Now Pak Sanjaya is beginning to progressively replace his synthetic fertilizer with cow manure and is thinking about returning to traditional varieties.
So things are changing in the ricefields. But these and other similar projects appearing all over Bali are not just about agriculture and even less about tourism - they involve distinctively post-tourism visions of what economic development could be. Some of them sell their produce to the tourism industry, but none of them depend on it. If tourism flourishes again, they will prosper as a result. But none of them is designed for tourism - all of them will work, albeit in different ways, whether tourism flourishes again or not. They hold the promise of a post-tourism agriculture and a healthier, less dependent relationship with tourism. ii
Graeme MacRae (G.S.Macrae@massey.ac.nz ) teaches Social Anthropology at Massey University Auckland, New Zealand. He has been researching in Bali since 1993 and has published on a wide range of topics. Nowadays he tries to make his research useful by focusing on sustainable development projects. In his spare time he grows organic fruit and vegetables.
Source: http://insideindonesia.org/
January 14th, 2008