- Many farmers on the coast of East Halmahera district in Indonesia’s Maluku region continue to rely on processing flour from sago trees as a food staple, rather than the ubiquitous white rice consumed by most families in the world’s fourth-most populous country.
- However, expansion of nickel and other mining concessions in the Maluku region threatens much of this traditional foodstuff, a trend Mongabay has documented extensively previously in the eastern Papua region.
- Lily Ishak, the dean of the agriculture faculty at North Maluku’s Khairun University, believes the history of traditional sago consumption could be erased within a century if the government does not expand protection efforts.
EAST HALMAHERA, Indonesia — Halik Fanen and his wife, Fatimun, spent much of the day sifting the couple’s inheritance into seven plastic sacks near the east of Indonesia’s Halmahera Island.
“These sago trees aren’t giving all that much because they are still small, so the yield is so-so,” Halik told Mongabay Indonesia as flour cascaded into its container. “If they were bigger, we’d have gotten 13 sacks out of these four trees.”
Fatimun’s late parents bequeathed to the couple this orchard of sago palms, together with 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of coconut palms. At harvest time, the couple begins a traditional process that refines the raw sago pith into a starchy flour.
Sago and root vegetables used to be preferred food staples across much of eastern Indonesia before the New Order government under Suharto began to promote white rice in the 1970s — creating a supply chain for the grain largely controlled by the Suharto family and its retinue of cronies.
A new glut of subsidized fertilizer and cheap seeds boosted rice farming, and improved the affordability of a grain previously seen as the food of the elite.
Decades later, Indonesian public health experts citing numerous research studies say overreliance on refined white rice is fueling millions of undiagnosed cases of diabetes, which can lead to life-changing injuries and early death.
Tumbling rice
Bicoli is one of the oldest villages in South Maba subdistrict, which is separated from the Western Pacific Ocean only by a clutch of small outlying islands off the east coast of Halmahera.
Residents of Bicoli used to eat white rice only on Fridays, a day of community prayer in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
In recent years, most of the residents of Bicoli village have switched to eating sweeter white rice every day. These days Halik and Fatimun’s grandchild recoils at the sight of sago.
In the past, Bicoli residents relied for food on hundreds of hectares of sago forests growing to the north and south of the village. Nutmeg and clove trees also provided families with a saleable commodity.
Today, the villagers say they worry that these kinds of community forests face a new threat from the mining boom underway in East Halmahera district, where Bicoli is located.
State-owned miner PT Aneka Tambang operates a vast nickel mine in the district classified as a “national strategic project” by the central government. Environmental advocates expect the mine’s ferronickel plant will spark new mining and forest loss in the district of around 100,000 people.
Data from Global Forest Watch, a remote-sensing platform operated by the World Resources Institute, showed East Halmahera district lost 40,100 hectares (99,100 acres) of old-growth forest in the two decades to 2023, a reduction of 7.4% in old-growth tree cover in just 20 years.
While no company has yet altered the landscape around Bicoli village or the broader South Maba subdistrict, villagers recounted numerous attempts to acquire land.
“Community land was going to be handed over a few years ago,” said Jainal, a resident of Bicoli. “After a while the company left, and it hasn’t yet come back.”
Jainal said many people here worried that a mining company could move in overnight and abruptly uproot the community’s sago trees, as happened in Weda subdistrict, around 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of Bicoli.
Dead flours
Sufandi Seng, a fieldworker with civil society organization Fala Lamo, the name for a traditional house in the local Ternate language, said the introduction of extractive industries threatened many of the remaining sago trees, compounding the demise of sago flour as a food staple.
A 2023 study by Indonesia’s national research agency noted that sago “requires fewer resources, such as water, fertilizers, and pesticides, than traditional staple crops like rice, wheat, or corn.”
In addition, sago usually grows well in ungiving soil, and is likely to prove far more resilient to shifts in weather patterns as climate change evolves, the authors noted.
“By promoting the cultivation and consumption of sago rice, we can reduce the strain on natural resources and minimize the environmental impact associated with conventional farming practices,” the research concluded.
Lily Ishak, dean of the agriculture faculty at Khairun University in Ternate, the capital of North Maluku province, where East Halmahera is located, said cultivation of sago remained woven into customary tradition, but that the trend of land-use changes underway in North Maluku could erase this food stock.
“In East Halmahera, the potential for sago is extraordinary. But because it isn’t protected, the sago forest area has begun to decline drastically,” Lily told Mongabay Indonesia. “These conditions mean that in the next 50 to 100 years, the sago land will vanish without trace.”
Lily has pressed the East Halmahera district government to allow her university to establish a sago research center to help conserve the trees.
In May this year, the university submitted a proposal to the East Halmahera government and the forestry ministry for a 500-hectare (1,240-acre) research plot.
“We hope the proposal is approved because it aims to minimize forest destruction while supporting government efforts to conserve forests and their biodiversity,” Lily said.
For Halik and Fatimun, the roots of their prosperity in older age are tied to the sago trees passed down the generations here in Bicoli.
Over the course of the next few months, Halik, 67, and Fatimun, 59, will use the sago flour to meet their own needs, and send some as a care package to their two children, who, like an increasing number of young Indonesians, are working in the Maluku region’s booming mining industry.
For now, these trees are crucial to the family’s food security. As the sago plants reach maturity and the couple slows down, the trees become the couple’s retirement plan.
“This sago can be used as capital when we work the land planting nutmeg, cloves and coconuts,” Halik said. “When we’re old, the plants become our savings.”
Banner image: Farmers squeezing sago palms in South Hakmahera. Image by Mahmud Ichi/Mongabay Indonesia.
This story was first published here in Indonesian on Dec. 2, 2024.
Photos: The lives and forests bound to Indonesia’s nickel dreams
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