The Price of paper looks into the effects of the expanding Indonesian paper industry on the local community. Looking into a small village in Riau, I found what used to be a thriving rice farming community, now completely changed due to a nearby forest conversion. The massive forest conversion changed much of the village’s surrounding ecosystem, destroying their heirloom rice paddy fields, and forced many of them into other source of income, including illegal logging.
By the end of 2013 a paper was released in the Science journal, proclaiming Indonesia as the biggest contributor of deforestation after overtaking Brazil. The matter of forest cover and its relation to global warming has been a major topic for the last couple of decades. At least as far back as 1998, scholars and activists have been dwelling in the effort to reduce deforestation. Too often, however, the issue has been seen only in its relation to global warming, portrayed by charts, figures, and statistics. In reality, the story behind deforestation is complex, and can be more real than how it is usually perceived.
While researching on deforestation, I found that one of the major contributors on deforestation in Indonesia that tend to be overlooked turned to be the paper industry, converting natural forests into monoculture forests of acacia. I decided to look at the people directly affected by the forest disappearance. A rice farmer turned fisherman, a farmer turned illegal logger, a bird catcher worried about the number of bird species left in the forest, and a honey catcher losing his income from the lack of bees – for these people, deforestation and a shift in ecosystem is more than just numbers and charts; for them, it is their livelihood.
I documented the effect of the conversion – a process that, due to legal terminology and definition, is not considered as deforestation in Indonesia despite its negative effects on the ecosystem – on the immediate neighboring populations in the province of Riau, island of Sumatra. The result is a complex mix of the expected and unexpected. On one side, the effect on the previously farming society was evident – loss of farming ability due to animal attacks, disappearing animals for hunting and source of income – while on the other side, the social interplay between the company, local governments and the villagers leaves much to be desired in terms of cause and corrections.
In the end, it is likely that considering deforestation in Indonesia and other similar countries as international problem would require more than funding and grants from international communities as it has been done over the years, but also global economic transparency and knowledge on where our products come from – in this case, a portion of our paper comes from – and in direct effect towards – a small village called Meranti in the middle of Sumatra.