Take a speedboat through one of the myriad canals that criss-cross the Mahakam Delta, running into Makassar Strait, east of Borneo, and you get a wonderful sense of luxuriant vegetation unsullied by human activity. Yet scratch beneath the surface – or rather hover above it – and the paradox is all too clear. Viewed from the sky by helicopter, the natural décor reveals a harsher reality: never-ending stretches of flooded land, painstakingly partitioned into plots bordered by a green net separating them from the river’s branches.
Like a Hollywood set, three mangrove branches is all that separates one world from another, a shrubby threshold into thousands of hectares of ponds dedicated to shrimp farming. The origins of this contrast lie in the economic and financial crisis that hit Southeast Asia in 1997, a black year for the Indonesian population that triggered a 400% devaluation of the local currency, the rupiah. With significant export opportunities to Japan and Australia, sources of hard currency, shrimp farming suddenly became a very profitable industry. The riverside populations were quickly joined by waves of fishers from Sulawesi who flooded into the delta, organising themselves into communities financed by investors, known as punggawas. Farming has since intensified. Ten years on and the shrimp have got the better of the mangroves, the environment surrendering to short-term profit.

Rehabilitating the delta: a question of survival
Any ecological disequilibrium raises the question of priority: in this case, between the shrimp and the mangrove. The shrimp, after all, is a source of food and income to thousands of people, while the mangrove is ostensibly worthless. Wouldn’t preserving these woody plants simply be a way of easing the consciences of ecologists? The neartotal clearing of the delta has deprived the sandy, and therefore unstable, land of its only fortification. The effect of the tides has made the risk of the Mahakam Delta completely disappearing, along with the shrimp, any income and the farmers themselves, imminent. “The mangrove has an essential role in balancing out the ecosystem, mainly by filtering plankton,” explains Dasat, an environment specialist at Total E&P Indonesia. “Since 1998, farmers have been chopping down the mangroves and destroying this balance. We’re now seeing a year-on- year drop in productivity, worsened by the use of chemical products to eliminate the shrimp’s predators.” In other words, no mangroves mean no shrimp and no delta.
Both the speed at which the environment has deteriorated and the scope of action taken by the stakeholders are staggering. When you consider the Aral Sea, which has been waiting for water to return since 1975, it’s tempting to think that industrial interests can be channelled for ecological causes. “To save the Mahakam Delta, we’ve managed to bring all the parties concerned together for the first time around a common programme, the PMD Mahakam,” says Dipnala Tamzil, advisor to Total Indonesia’s CEO. “ So we have the Indonesian government, which is involved at every level – national regional and local; the industries operating in the delta – Total, of course, as well as the Japanese oil company Inpex; and then the United Nations represented by the UNPD which is running the project.”

Mutual interests, major goals
Launched in April 2007, the PMD Mahakam provides that the committee in charge of managing the programme meets every four months to review the progress made in achieving the three major goals. “First we need to improve how the delta is managed in order to secure and protect strategic investments,” acknowledges Soni Sumarsono, a Ministry of the Interior officer who heads up the committee. “Then protect the environment, which entails educating farmers on sustainable and environmentally-friendly farming; and lastly safeguard the growth of local revenues, mainly by promoting alternatives to shrimp farming.”
The programme has a 3.7 million dollar budget, a million of which comes from Total, to be spent over five years. “The budget equals 3% of the income generated by shrimp production in the delta,” specifies Monique Sumampouw, head of operations at the UNDP. “It may be small,” she admits, “but it’s enough to develop a model that we can apply to other situations and other locations.” This could be “Bintuni Bay, in Papua New Guinea, where similar actions would be beneficial,” adds Budhi Sayoko, the committee’s UNPD representative. One merit of the PMD Mahakam programme is unquestionably its aim to implement and optimise a complex organisation that can be easily duplicated at other sites. Because there lies the rub: how can the actions taken by Total and Inpex – which are both actively engaged in the field – be coordinated with initiatives led by the Indonesian government and the UNDP, the operator and itself represented by UNITAR (the United Nations Institute for Training and Research) on matters of technical expertise and UNV (UN Volunteers) for deploying solutions in situ? “We set up five coordination teams and divided the responsibilities pertaining to the different areas of intervention amongst them,” explain Dipnala Tamzil and Soni Sumarsono with one voice. This five-point business model – designed to support local managers, manage the land, develop sustainable farming, generate an alternative economy and replant the mangroves – has five years to succeed. And to Dinala Tamzil’s own admission, the technical challenges are the least of their troubles.

Pilot farms: trial cohabitation
The primary concern was to restore the ecosystem and bring sustainable development to the delta. In this area, operatives working on the PMD programme had a few years’ lead thanks to a preliminary project carried out by Total E&P Indonesia near the village of Tani Baru, the site of a pilot farm opened in 2000 that laid the foundations of environmentally-friendly shrimp farming. “We followed two essential principles at Tanjung Pingpin farm,” explains Dasat. “On the one hand, we planted a new variety of mangrove – Rhizophora mucronata – in the ponds.” This species offers multiple benefits: it contributes to the support of the soil, provides antiviral agents and nutrients vital for shrimp survival, is easier to plant and is more tolerant of fluctuating salinity levels than the endemic species, the Nypa palm. “Then we used nothing but organic products to ward off birds, snakes and fish, the shrimp’s natural predators. Unlike chemical products used by farmers, these substances have the advantage of being recycled back into the ecosystem,” continues Dasat.
Total based its experiment to exploit these eight hectares of pond surrounded by some 100 hectares of replanted forestland on studies carried out by the University of Mulawarman, which also brought its scientific expertise to the PMD project to answer questions on the most suitable species, pesticides and replanting techniques. The key idea is to safeguard the futures of both shrimp farming and the mangroves by creating a respectful environment of cohabitation, a practice dubbed “silvipisciculture”. In addition to Tani Baru, two other pilot villages, Muara Pantuan and Sepatin, are planning to apply this model early this year in an effort to educate and train up the local population. The process will be subsequently deployed on a larger scale.

Data merging for greater management
Alongside support to sustainable farming, areas exclusively planted with mangroves are set to follow, the communities having agreed to give up some 600 hectares of their ponds in the general interest. According to most recent estimates, 90,000 hectares of mangrove swamps have been destroyed. The margin of progress is therefore appreciable. On that subject, Total E&P Indonesia has its own database, accompanied by Spot satellite images, that has been helpful in tracking changes to the delta over the past ten years. “We decided to merge our database with the one to be compiled by the PMD programme so that we could establish a sort of land use map for shrimp farmers,” explains Didik Widiarso, coordinator of Total’s environment programme. In line with the objectives set by the committee, this initiative will tighten management of the rehabilitation of destroyed areas, while also providing concrete elements for settling land disputes. The majority of land has in fact been cleared and allocated more or less unofficially, the land use map defined for the delta not being respected. The battle is on not just to counter anti-ecological practices but also – and more importantly – an anarchic operation that serves the minority. In 2002, CIRAD (the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development) also carried out a seven-month study in the delta, partly financed by Total, the conclusions of which highlighted problems of communitarianism and the ecological and health risks of non-integrated farming, illustrated, for example, by the alarming rise of salinity and the emergence of new diseases. This report also concluded that alternative resources needed to be found, a fundamental aspect of the project and since adopted by the PMD programme.

Towards harmonious development of the communities
More than 60,000 people live in the delta. To comprehend the significance of this and grasp that a massive population is relying on the delta’s poor resources to subsist, you would need to take the time to explore the river’s branches and the snaking paths that cut through the lowlands. Anybody who was unable to invest in shrimp farming will have trouble earning a livelihood: fish is currently selling for 2,000 rupiahs per kilo (about 11 pence), more than twenty times less than shrimp! The necessary regulations now in place are never going to help the local economy; so economic measures have been added to the PMD programme’s administrative and ecological provisions. This is where Total’s experience proved helpful.
This year the Indonesian government passed a law that will require oil and mining companies to develop CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programmes.Total’s subsidiary in Indonesia, ahead of its legal obligations, had actually launched a local development programme (ComDev) in 1999, a source of inspiration for the PMD’s managers. “The idea is to suggest alternative business activities to shrimp farming,” continues Didik Widiarso. “This will guarantee a minimum wage for local populations and help protect the environment.”
The community development operations taken up by the subsidiary have targeted twenty-five villages. The initiatives are supported by a team of twelve, eight of whom work in the field, to take needs and suggestions on board to promote the many initiatives. Aside from the recurrent themes of health, education and infrastructures, ComDev’s objectives are closely associated with those of the PMD and they both share the common goal to boost the local economy. Several trading coops have already been set up, along with a fish farm, a computer concern, tailors, a local radio station and even a pineapple plantation, which could become an alternative farm produce. It is perhaps the capacity to develop such initiatives, and consequently curb the destruction of the Mahakam Delta, that will bring salvation to the region.
As perfectly summed up by the UNPD’s representative, Budhi Sayoko: “We are attempting here to build three cornerstones of sustainable development: to protect the environment, stimulate economic growth and make people happy!” A local formula that he would like to see made universal.