- Formed millions of years ago in the Indian Ocean by a process independent of tectonic collision, Indonesia’s Enggano Island is now home to many unique species and a diverse Indigenous society of subsistence farmers.
- Since the early 1990s, developers have sought to obtain control over large parts of the island, but encountered staunch opposition from its six Indigenous tribes.
- Today, PT Sumber Enggano Tabarak, which has been linked to the billionaire-owned London Sumatra group, is seeking to establish an oil palm plantation over 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres).
- Civil society researchers and Indigenous elders say the island lacks sufficient freshwater to provide irrigation to both the community and an industrial oil palm plantation, and that a plantation at scale risks catalyzing an ecological crisis.
ENGGANO ISLAND, Indonesia — Milson Kaitora’s grandparents never had trouble finding water to grow food here on Enggano Island. But today, coastal abrasion is pushing back the shoreline of Milson’s village, and the dearth of freshwater has reduced the annual rice harvest from twice a year to just once.
“Now, there isn’t even enough water, the rice fields have become abandoned land,” Milson Kaitora, the Pa’abuki, or tribal leader, of the Enggano Indigenous people, told Mongabay Indonesia.
Saltwater abrasion is gradually submerging land and intruding on freshwater sources beneath Enggano, which is leading to desiccation of the community’s once-fertile rice fields. With an Indonesian company now targeting the island for palm oil development, people here fear worse is to come.
Enggano was formed by oceanic crust and is today slightly larger than the city of Detroit. It never joined to the mainland of Indonesia’s main western island of Sumatra, meaning Enggano is host to a unique array of endemic animal and plant species.
Oceanic islands like Enggano, or the Galápagos, form when magma rises up from beneath the ocean to create a new land mass. Such islands develop a degree of ecological isolation from their nearest mainland, which were formed out of tectonic collision, because species on an oceanic island must arrive naturally, usually via the wind or sea. As the millennia pass, these plant and animal species proceed further down their own evolutionary path.
The explorers Charles Miller and Elio Modigliani traversed Enggano on foot after arriving in the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively. More recently, Indonesia’s government surveyed the island as a launch site for rockets into space.
Research published this year in the Indonesian Journal of Science & Technology noted 345 ethnozoological papers had been published on Enggano between 1974 and 2024, with only a handful of new classifications recorded until an accelerated trend of discovery emerged after 2008.
In 1927, Joseph Harvey Riley documented a new classification of owl endemic to Enggano, the Enggano scops-owl (Otus enganensis).
In 2014 L. Lee Grismer and colleagues published their description of the Enggano dwarf gecko (Hemiphyllodactylus engganoensis), a reptile unique to the island.
Today, the island is also home to around 4,000 people and the Enggano Indigenous identity, which comprises six distinct tribal groups: the Kaahoao, Kaamay, Kaarubi, Kaharuba, Kaitora and Kauno.
More than a third of the island is forested, and conservation and protected forest accounts for nearly 31% of the land area.
Enggano’s forests are also rich in hardwood diversity, including species of merbau (Instsia bijuga), pakaror (Shorea macroptera) and bintangur (Calophyllum inophyllum).
Every customary matter or concern related to government is overseen by the Pa’abuki. For Milson, who currently holds the position, those matters are perhaps more pressing today than ever.
‘Oil palm can’t be here’
The unique Enggano landscape, formed over millions of years, has been threatened by industrial land-use change for a little over three decades.
In 1991, a company called PT Enggano Dwipa Persada (EDP) petitioned the government to take control of around 20% of the island’s land area for large-scale development.
Indonesia’s minister of forestry at the time rejected the application because Enggano’s land was zoned almost entirely as “protected forest,” with only a limited pocket permissible as “production forest.”
However, EDP obtained a separate permit from the governor of Bengkulu province, which has jurisdiction over Enggano, and arrived on the island with excavators.
Five tribal chiefs on Enggano sent letters to Indonesia’s ministers of forestry, environment and home affairs, pleading with the central government to prevent the firm from logging their unique forest.
However, Indonesia’s government later decided in 1998 that it was time to cut into Enggano’s landscape, authorizing a 10,000-hectare (24,700-acre) concession to EDP.
The company first cleared a limited area for production of animal feed, but its excavators later felled 2,400 hectares (5,930 acres) for a melinjo plantation (the plant, Gnetum gnemon, has applications in the food industry).
EDP’s permit covered Banjar Sari village and extended into the territories of other villages: Apoho, Ka’ana, Kahyapu and Malakoni, as well as Milson’s village, Meok.
Bincar Pangapul, a resident of Malakoni village, said he first realized what was taking place when he witnessed large logs being transported off the island.
“It just isn’t clear what the benefit is for the people here,” Bincar told Mongabay Indonesia.
In 2022, the erstwhile concession operated by EDP was transferred as an oil palm concession to another firm, PT Sumber Enggano Tabarak (SET).
Milson, the Pa’abuki, and other Indigenous elders protested the arrival of SET on the island.
“It has been agreed,” Milson said. “Oil palm can’t be here.”
In a bid to strengthen their own hand, the Indigenous elders in 2020 petitioned the provincial council in Bengkulu to pass a bylaw, or perda, affirming their status as an officially recognized customary group. This was when companies were already planning to carve oil palm plantations into Enggano, and the perda would have strengthened the communities’ administration over the island. But the provincial council has to date still not passed it.
“Those oil palms suck up a lot of water,” Milson said. “Enggano is small. If the water runs out, we’ll all be in trouble.”
Milson said the company had approached local residents with offers of free oil palm seedlings to win over some subsistence farmers to this new cash crop.
“Our residents in Banjar Sari and Ka’ana have started planting oil palms in their gardens,” he said. “There are 30 hectares [74 acres] of oil palms planted in the two villages.”
Aswin, a retired civil servant who lives in Ka’ana village, said he saw oil palm cultivation as an opportunity to increase his income by becoming one of an estimated 3 million smallholders in the world’s largest palm oil-producing country.
“Palm oil has a fairly good price in the market,” Aswin said. “As long as it’s on your own plot and not a forest area, it should be an individual right [to cultivate oil palms], not a customary right.”
During a visit to Enggano in June, Mongabay saw oil palm trees less than a decade old that had already started producing fruit.
SET first applied for a 15,000-hectare (37,000-acre) oil palm permit on Enggano in 2022, according to the corporate records database managed by the Ministry of Law.
SET’s profile in the database indicates it may be controlled by London Sumatra, a group of palm oil companies that Mongabay’s reporting has previously shown to have failed to provide Indigenous peoples with their legal entitlement to community plantations.
Known as Lonsum, the group is itself part of the vast, billionaire-owned Salim Group conglomerate, which is best known for Indomie, one of the world’s best-selling instant noodle brands. Neither SET nor Lonsum replied to a request for comment.
Are you Lonsum tonight
Susanto, the elected head of Enggano, which is administered as a subdistrict of Bengkulu’s North Bengulu district, said the island was under threat from wholesale oil palm development and that local communities were opposed to the industry’s expansion in their home.
Susanto said the company had never requested to meet with him in an official capacity, adding that its representatives had met with village chiefs and that the firm had begun community outreach again this year.
Erwin Basrin, director of the Akar Global Initiative, a nonprofit that has worked with Indigenous communities for two decades, said neglecting the rights of Enggano’s people to manage their customary land had opened the door to land-use change by companies practiced in navigating local opposition to land conversion.
“The Enggano Indigenous community has very rich traditional knowledge about environmental management,” Basrin said. “However, this knowledge is often sidelined.”
Industrial plantations on Enggano could catalyze a domino effect on the biodiversity of Enggano, threatening unique species and undermining the hydrology sustaining the island’s people.
Said Jauhar, a section chief at the Bengkulu provincial conservation agency, acknowledged the importance of conserving forest on Enggano.
Johan Risandi, an oceanographer at Indonesia’s state research agency, said far-flung Indonesian islands in the Indian Ocean — from Aceh’s Simeleue off the northern tip of Sumatra, through the Mentawai chain off the middle, to Enggano off the southwest — were increasingly under the spotlight as the government looked to spark development in outlying regions of the world’s largest archipelagic country.
Johan said the amount of water required by thirsty oil palm trees on thousands of hectares of Enggano soil presented clear and obvious risks.
“If there is seawater intrusion, the island will definitely be abandoned by residents,” Johan said.
“What’s saddening is the [fate of the] residents there,” he added. “Investors can just leave the island without any burden, because they have no connection to the island.”
Enggano’s highest peak, Mount Koho Buwa-buwa, stands at 240 meters (787 feet) above the island’s 126-kilometer (78-mile) coastline, which is fringed by coral reefs lifted by the movement of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate.
“This company not only threatens the plantations and forests, but also conflict between residents in the future,” said Susanto, the Enggano subdistrict head, acknowledging that the arrival of big developers in remote communities often pits locals against each other as they scramble to sell their lands — or, fraudulently, someone else’s. This is especially the case when they believe the company will take over their land one way or another, so they might as well get some cash in return rather than be coerced off it with nothing to show for it.
Around the 1930s, Enggano’s people moved from the uplands down to the coast, adopting irrigation techniques to cultivate 800 hectares (1,980 acres) of rice fields strictly for self-sufficiency.
“The forest area in Enggano isn’t just about the trees,” said Milson, the island’s Pa’abuki. “It’s our home.”
Banner image: A man looks up at a merbau tree, which grows abundantly on Enggano Island. Image by Elviza Diana/Mongabay Indonesia.
This story was first published here in Indonesian on Nov. 24, 2024.
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