Archive for January, 2008
For many years, young Karonese people from North Sumatra have traveled to Jakarta in search of their fortunes.
Their journeys are usually only one-way trips, with most of them believing their prospects are brighter in the capital.
The Mburo Ate Tedeh festival, organized recently by the Indonesian Association of Karo People (HMKI), provided an opportunity for Karo natives living in Jakarta to reminisce about their homeland.
More than 2,000 people attended the event, which was held at the Senayan Sports Center in Central Jakarta.
A member of HMKI, Inget Sembiring, agreed that people from Karo who migrate to Jakarta rarely return to their hometowns.
“They usually stay in their new homes and work hard to be successful. They support their relatives back home by sending money,” said Inget, who has lived in Jakarta for 59 years.
The South Jakarta resident left his hometown when he was 19 to study in the capital. He now works as a commissioner at a private bank.
People of Karo ethnicity inhabit various parts of North Sumatra, including Karo Plateau, Deli Serdang, Binjai, Langkat, Dairi, Medan and Southeast Aceh. Karo regency in North Sumatra is named after the ethnic group.
Mburo Ate Tedeh are ancient grand jamborees that were originally held in North Sumatra. Traditionally people organize and attend these festivals to thank God for the annual harvest.
The Mburo Ate Tedeh festival held in Jakarta recently incorporated various forms of entertainment, including dancing, singing and poetry recitals.
The Gendang Adat and Gendang Guro-guro Aron dances were among popular attractions at the festival. Traditionally these dances can last for several hours and are seen as an opportunity for young Karonese people to find their soul mates.
While Mburo Ate Tedeh festivals can sometimes last for an entire week, Karonese people in Jakarta had to make do with a 12-hour equivalent.
The head of the festival’s organizing committee, Budianto Tarigan, said the event would be held annually so Karonese people could gather with relatives in Jakarta.
“Karonese people usually return to the region during New Year’s celebrations or for school holidays. However, this event gives people a chance to see each other more often,” he said.
Inget said up to 150,000 Karo natives lived in the Greater Jakarta area. He said Karo migrants worked in various fields, including as civil servants, entrepreneurs, drivers, lawyers and politicians.
“About 35 percent of them work as food vendors and drivers,” Budianto said.
Rostiana Tarigan, a Karo native who traveled to Jakarta with her aunt 20 years ago, runs a staple food stall out of her house in Warakas, North Jakarta.
“I have 15 siblings. Seven of them work and live in Jakarta,” she said.
Budianto said less Karo people had been traveling to Jakarta since the monetary crisis in 1997.
“The city is no longer so attractive for Karonese people,” he said.
“Many Karo natives also go to other cities in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua to work as farmers,” Inget said.
Budianto said HMKI planned to organize training workshops for Karo migrants in the future. He said the workshops would include automotive training.
The recent Mburo Ate Tedeh festival was attended by Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo, who said he hoped all ethnic groups in the city could live in harmony.
“The richness of cultures in the city is interesting for Jakartans and tourists alike. I hope the committee will hold this event annually,” Fauzi said. (tif)
Source: The Jakarta Post
January 21st, 2008
Indonesia participated in the recent Reiseliv tourism fair, Norway’s biggest annual international travel and tourism trade fair, to put Indonesia back on the destination radar of Norwegian tourists, the Indonesian ambassador to Norway said.
The fair was held in the town of Lillestorm from Jan. 10-13.
The Indonesian pavilion offered attractive tourist packages, cultural performances and culinary presentations.
“Through its participation, Indonesia believes that it can enrich Norwegian knowledge concerning Indonesian tourism. It would be an ideal opportunity for the tourism industry in Norway to know more about Indonesia,” Indonesian Ambassador to Norway Retno L. P. Marsudi said in a press release sent to The Jakarta Post from Oslo.
As many as 33,000 visitors, consisting of tourism industry players from Norway and nearby countries such as Sweden and Denmark, attended the fair.
At least two Balinese tourism companies, along with the State Ministry for Tourism and Culture and the Indonesian Embassy in Oslo, offered presentations on tourism in Indonesia.
“Diving and adventure tours are among the most attractive in Indonesia for foreign tourists”, Retno said.
Besides getting information on Indonesia and its tourist offerings, visitors also had an opportunity to enjoy performances of Balinese dances and gamelan.
Retno said Bali and surrounding areas had huge tourism potential, thus the pavilion’s central theme: “Indonesia: Bali and Beyond”.
Reiseliv is an important trade event in Norway, targeting travel agencies and potential tourists. (JP/Esther Samboh)
Source: The Jakarta Post
January 21st, 2008
By JASON TEDJASUKMANA
“Visitor-friendly” might not be the first description that comes to mind when talking about an island swarming with giant, carnivorous lizards. But Indonesia’s Komodo, the entire area of which is a World Heritage Site and national park, is becoming just that, thanks to an array of new visitor facilities that make seeing the fabled Komodo dragons more enjoyable.
Komodo lies between the islands of Flores and Sumbawa. Overseas visitors typically take a 90-minute flight from Bali to Labuan Bajo in the western part of Flores, then charter a boat to Komodo — the closest you’ll ever come to Jurassic Park.
More than 2,500 Komodo dragons still roam freely across the island, with some measuring up to 10 ft. (3 m) in length. There are 37 different types of reptile species besides, as well as 32 species of mammals. The waters off Komodo are diver heaven — home to more than 1,000 species of fish, 385 species of reef-building corals and six species of whales.
These kinds of natural assets have prompted the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy (TNC), in partnership with the International Finance Corporation (a World Bank offshoot) and the local government, to develop Komodo into an ecotourism destination that will eventually become self-supporting, they hope, through visitor revenues. Some 17,000 visited the park in 2007 but TNC hopes to double that number over the next few years.
“We are trying to create tourism with a sense of responsibility,” explains Marcus Matthews-Sawyer, director of tourism, marketing and communications at Putri Naga Komodo, a private-sector partnership set up in 2005 to manage the park. “This is a world-class destination that needs the right facilities to make it attractive to more than just adventure travelers.”
The badly needed new additions include a visitor-reception building, decent toilets, a combined restaurant and retail outlet with great souvenirs, and information panels detailing the flora and fauna on the island. “Our vision is to position Komodo National Park as a World Heritage Site in Indonesia and the region as a whole,” says Rili Djohani of TNC. “Hopefully, when people think ecotourism and nature, they will think of Komodo National Park.”
Detailed information, including a guide to alternative transport arrangements, can be found at www.komodonationalpark.org. Do note that July and August is mating season, which makes it more difficult to catch a glimpse of the dragons — and even if you do spot one, a mating Komodo dragon is disturbed only at your dire peril.
Source: http://www.time.com/
January 18th, 2008
January 17, 2008
Predatory
starfish are swarming over one of the world’s most diverse coral reef ecosystems, researchers announced, threatening the health of reefs throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Crown-of-thorns starfish, named for the long spines covering their bodies, feed on
corals by spreading their stomachs over the animals living inside, then secreting enzymes that liquefy the corals’ tissue.
“They prefer certain species and take them first, then they’ll eat the others later,” said Alison Green, a marine scientist with the nonprofit Nature Conservancy.
The starfish are found naturally throughout the Indo-Pacific. But a recent survey of reefs off the Indonesian island of Halmahera revealed that the numbers of the predators in some areas are double those that exist in a healthy reef.
Halmahera, the largest island in Indonesia’s Maluku group, lies within the “coral triangle,” which has been described as a global center of marine biodiversity.
The triangle spans eastern Indonesia, parts of Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor, and the Solomon Islands (see a map of the region).
The localized starfish outbreak, experts say, could be an early warning of more widespread reef decline.
“Imagine the most beautiful coral reef with lots of three-dimensional structure, lots of color, and lots of fish,” Green said.
“Then [imagine] the same place, except that it is dead, covered in black algae, and the fish are gone. Crown-of-thorns can do that.”
Huge Outbreak
Andrew Baird is a scientist with the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.
He was part of the starfish survey team, jointly led by the ARC center and the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
The team found between 300 and 400 crown-of-thorns starfish within a hectare (2.5 acres) of reef around Halmahera, Baird said. “On [Australia’s] Great Barrier Reef, we define an outbreak as 200 animals per hectare,” Baird said.
High nutrient levels due to agricultural fertilizer runoff were most likely responsible for the population boom, he added.
“It stimulates blooms of microalgae—plankton—and the larvae of the crown-of-thorns starfish, under those conditions, survive very well,” he said.
“In normal years, perhaps one in a million [starfish larvae] might survive. In one of these years, maybe a hundred in a million survive. You get huge recruitment.”
Overfishing of the starfish’s natural predators, such as triggerfish and the giant triton mollusk, likely worsened the situation.
Survey teams also found evidence of reef blasting—a practice that uses explosives to stun fish or collect coral as construction material.
“A lot of people rely on the reefs for their livelihood and their food. Without healthy reefs, it could result in serious economic hardship,” Baird said.
(Related news: “Coral Reefs Vanishing Faster Than Rain Forests” [August 7, 2007].)
Bounce Back
For now, the experts noted, certain species on the reef show healthy enough populations that the ecosystem could recover.
“I think the answer lies in good management to prevent the outbreaks in the first place,” the Nature Conservancy’s Green said.
“We need to be particularly careful about how we manage the land and fisheries in those areas.”
A network of marine protected areas, she said, combined with land-use and fisheries reforms, would ensure the survival of the coral triangle.
“Reefs can cope with periodic disturbances if they are healthy. If they’ve got good fish populations, good water quality, and good coral, they can bounce back within 10 to 15 years.”
Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/
January 18th, 2008
Denpasar, Bali (ANTARA News) - The number of Indian tourists visiting Bali in the first eleven months of 2007 jumped 81.6 percent to 19,204 from a year earlier, a tour operator said.
“I believe the number of Indian tourists visiting Bali will continue to increase because Indian and Balinese peoples have many things in common,” Cokorda Agung said on Wednesday.
“The potential to attract more Indian tourists is very great, the more so because India will be one of the targets of the Indonesian tourism campaign to start in February 2008,” he said.
He said the Indian government had opened its culture foundation in Bali with the aim of fostering relations with the Balinese people.
India last year ranked 14th in terms of foreign tourists visiting Bali.
To conduct the tourism campaign in India, the Indonesian government has set up tourism representative offices in Delhi and Mumbai.
Similar offices have also been set up in other 11 countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain, China and Saudi Arabia.
Director of Foreign Promotion at the Indonesian Culture and Tourism Ministry Tatang Rukhiyat said on the sidelines of a meeting with 20 Indian film producers in Mumbai, India, on Tuesday that the number of Indian tourists visiting Indonesia last year rose 52 percent to around 84,000 from a year earlier. (*)
Source: ANTARA News
January 17th, 2008
Manado, Indonesia - Indonesia consists of more than 18,000 islands. Bali, Sumatra and Java are familiar names for many travellers but Sulawesi, formally known as Celebes, is relatively unknown to most tourists. But anyone who makes their way to this island is richly rewarded with unusual sights and experiences and some visitors have even been invited to funeral ceremonies. The island’s jungle has a vast variety of fauna such as apes and the surrounding coral seas are populated by seahorses. Most tourists travel to the highlands in the south or to the Manado region in the north. Outsiders are still a novelty for most locals. “We did well by the creator,” says Kern Panambunan. The tour guide is standing on a hill in the Tomohon highlands, about an hour’s drive inland from Manado. He points out the beans and tomatoes growing between the banana plants. Cabbage heads nestle amongst cinnamon and papaya trees. In the background are palm groves, fields of rice and grazing water buffalo. The people who live here are called the Minahasa and have mastered the art of cultivating the land and building terraces. The market in the small town of Tomohon is not for those with weak stomaches: the roasted dogs, “did not originate from the streets but from a breeding farm,” assures one seller. Children chew sugar cane while a grandmother turns the handle of a press that squeezes juice from the cane as her neighbour grates coconut flesh. Coffee, tea, tobacco, vanilla and different varieties of rice are all on sale at the market. A python hangs from one stall, partially cut into rings, and aa man sits whetting his machete. A kilogramme of python costs the equivalent of 2 euros (3 dollars). One of the main attractions for tourists is to experience the waterfalls, hills, mild climate and friendly locals. There’s plenty of well-priced accommodation to be found around Tomohon. However, it’s not the picturesque highland scenery but the diving spots that attract most people to northern Sulawesi. One of the pioneers of tourism here is Simone Gerristen from Amsterdam and a resident on Sulawesi for the past 11 years. Her Dive Centre Thalassa has 10 diving boats and up to 100 clients a day seek to explore the underwater world of Bunaken National Park. One couple from Hamburg, northern Germany, enthused about their encounters. “The visibility, animal and plant worlds are as good as in the Caribbean or the Maldives. But it’s far value here,” says the man. His wife adds: “When did you last see 20 different types of seahorse?”Two dives a day, three meals and overnight accommodation in a well-located house costs around 60 euros (88 dollars) a day. There are 20 diving schools competing for business in the region. Visitors to the village of Rante Lemo in the Toraja highlands, on the other hand, do not come here to dive but to focus on death. More than 100 villagers are busy making stages from bamboo cane as schoolgirls wearing blue dresses and light-coloured blouses wave to them. Large, carved and decorated coffins are made in most dwellings in the village. A funeral ceremony is being held the following week and the stages have to be ready for the 2,000 expected guests. The funeral ceremony is for a woman from the village who died in 2005 aged 65. “She will rest embalmed in her husband’s house for the four days of the funeral,” explains tour guide Muhammad Haris. Her family was wealthy, so about 30 water buffalo and 200 pigs will be sacrificed, says Haris. The more animals, “that travel to heaven” with the deceased and the more tourists that travel to the ceremony, the greater the honour for the surviving dependents and the dead person herself. Funeral ceremonies and Toraja’s cult of the dead have attracted tourists for decades. But due to the remoteness of the region, most people here have maintained the traditional customs even though many of them are officially Christians. Evidence of this ancestor worship is found in the decorated graves in the region’s caves, the tombs hewn into the rock and the mausoleums. A sheer cliff face descends into the valley where breadfruit, yucca, cocoa, Brazil nut and sweet potatoes grow. It’s an amazing feat the way the people of Toraja have managed to carve the tombs into the rock. Set into the cliff face are carved Tau Tau effigies that contain the souls of the dead. Anyone thinking of making a trip to Sulawesi will need several weeks to explore the island. The journey on the “highway” from the north to the south covers 2000 kilometres. All large towns have comfortable accommodation for travellers and busses journey travel the villages. If you are travelling on your own it’s a good idea to hire a guide which costs about 10 euros a day. Most holidaymakers, however, spend between 14 and 21 days on Sulawesi and fly from Manado to the south. Internet: www.my-indonesia.info, www.sulawesi-info.de, www.north- sulawesi.org, www.divenorthsulawesi.com, www.botschaft-indonesien.de.
Source: http://www.earthtimes.org/
January 16th, 2008
JAKARTA: Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Indonesia reached 10.34 billion dollars last year, 73.2 percent up on 2006, the National Investment Coordinating Board said Monday.
The amount was well above the board’s target of 42.6 trillion rupiah (4.5 billion dollars), it said.
Domestic investment rose 57.8 percent last year to 34.87 trillion rupiah, above the target of 25.96 trillion rupiah, the board said.
Overall, investment rose 71.7 percent. Singapore was the biggest source of FDI, putting 3.75 billion dollars into 124 projects, followed by the United Kingdom with 1.69 billion dollars, South Korea with 627.7 million dollars, Japan with 618.2 million dollars and Taiwan with 469.7 million dollars.
The agency said approved FDI reached 40.14 billion dollars last year, 156.48 percent more than in 2006.
Approved domestic investment was 188.87 trillion rupiah, up 16.0 percent. In total, the amount of investment approved rose 81.2 percent. Investment is one of the main current drivers of Indonesia’s economic growth, along with consumption and exports.
The government of Southeast Asia’s largest economy is forecasting growth in 2008 of 6.4 percent to 6.7 percent.
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Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/
January 15th, 2008
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
Officials from Indonesia’s, Yogyakarta’s tourism office have announced that international flights are set to resume to and from the ancient city after stopping in 2005 in a bid to boost tourism in the region. The city has recently attracted quite a bit of interest from tourists who are visiting the city as a launch pad to other attractions.
The head of Yogyakarta’s tourism office, Tazbir, has said that flights from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur will be served by Malaysian Airlines and Air Asia, with return trips flown three to four times a week per airline.
“We are relaunching flights as a part of Visit Indonesia 2008,” Tazbir told AFP.
Since enduring a series of terror bombings, natural disasters and health scares, Indonesia has recorded a 2.38 percent drop in foreign tourist arrivals to four million in 2006.
However, these figures have recently made a turn around, with Indonesia seeing its visitor figures increase by 14 percent in the first 11 months of 2007. It has been estimated that approximately 150,000 of those visitors went to Yogyakarta.
“With international direct flights, we hope to raise the arrival of international tourists by 30 percent this year,” said Tazbir.
He also revealed that Malaysian Airlines will commence flights on January 30 while Air Asia will start on February 1.
Source: http://www.etravelblackboardasia.com/
January 11th, 2008
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