- A court in Jambi province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra has sentenced a local woman to one year and four months in prison for using fire to clear farmland, a traditional practice among smallholder farmers.
- Indonesia’s laws technically allow small farmers to use controlled burning in certain circumstances, but conflicting regulations and government crackdowns have led to harsh penalties for individuals like Dewita.
- A 2023 Mongabay investigation found that more than 200 farmers across Indonesian Borneo had been convicted for land burning since the country’s 2015 wildfire crisis, highlighting systemic targeting of smallholders.
- While hundreds of small farmers have been prosecuted for land burning, large plantation companies responsible for far more extensive fires rarely face criminal charges.
TEBO, Indonesia — Dewita’s voice cracked through tears as she read her personal statement before a court on Dec. 3 in Tebo, a landlocked district in Jambi province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
“I beg your honor to show mercy and generosity, to give me the lightest possible punishment,” Dewita said.
In March last year, Dewita left her family home in Pemayungan village to a small parcel of land she and her husband had recently acquired. Prosecutors allege the 35-year-old then set a fire to clear that land for planting.
The presiding judge handed down a sentence of one year and four months in prison, plus a fine of 20 million rupiah ($1,240) or an additional three months behind bars. That amount is equivalent to almost 10 months the minimum wage in Tebo district.
Around a decade ago, Indonesia’s then-president Joko Widodo vowed to find a “permanent solution” to the wildfires afflicting the nation’s expansive peatlands and forest areas after catastrophic fire and public health damage in 2015 and 2019.
A Mongabay review of court documents in Indonesian Borneo found in 2023 that more than 200 individual farmers were convicted over burning land since the 2015 Southeast Asia wildfires crisis, in which around 3 million hectares (7.4 acres) of land burned during a dry season prolonged by El Niño.
In the lead-up to Dewita’s court date in Tebo last year, Mongabay Indonesia spoke with the young mother to understand a case that has renewed controversy over a crackdown on smallholder farmers, who tend to live close to Indonesia’s poverty line.
Internal migration
Around one year ago, Dewita’s husband, Lasro, lost his job, and the couple resolved to farm in order to provide for their young family.
The family had moved to Jambi province only four months prior to the offense, from Padang Lawas, a landlocked upland in North Sumatra province.
“We’re just migrants here, far from our family,” Dewita said. “It’s really just about making a living for the future of my little family.”
On July 31, Dewita received a phone call from her son while she was out of the family home.
“Mom, there’s someone here,” her son said.
Dewita returned home to find him with members of a fire task force established by the local government. They were accompanied by staff from PT Alam Bukit Tigapuluh (ABT), an ecosystem restoration company.
She told her interrogators that she had ignited the pile of branches and leaves burning across the street. She’d been clearing the land on her own since May, she said, cutting a 4-square-meter (13-square-foot) clearing and carrying the vegetation to a pile before alighting the biomass to dispose of the waste. Dewita had burned six such areas to plant chili, eggplant and rice seeds.
Dewita said she didn’t know the land she had bought in good faith fell within the boundaries of a land concession held by ABT. Officers later confiscated a machete and matches as evidence.
Photo op
Gundra, a police officer in Tebo district, told the courtroom that Indonesia’s meteorology agency, the BMKG, had detected a hotspot that day via remote sensing at the site in Pemayungan village.
That detection prompted members of the fire task force to conduct a ground check.
Gundra said that upon arrival at the location, the patrol saw flames burning 2 meters (7 feet) high on a patch of land 30 meters (100 feet) from Dewita’s single-story home.
Varial Adhi Putra, the acting district leader in Tebo, who was part of the patrol that day, asked that Dewita be taken to the local police station for interrogation. Dewita’s two children were left in the care of a neighbor.

A map produced by a civil society group, the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), showed that 12,792 hectares of land out of the 31,384 hectares (6,899 acres out of 77,552 acres) that comprise Pemayungan was managed by ABT.
Daru Adianto, a law lecturer at Brawijaya University in the city of Malang, testified as an expert witness that clearing land with fire was permissible under an exemption for some small farmers under Indonesia’s 2009 Environment Act.
That legal exception was designed to reflect pragmatism toward traditional farming techniques, but also the limitations faced by small farmers lacking machinery to clear or replant land.
“It’s due to limitations, but also tradition,” Daru said. “The tradition is protected by law and it is permitted to be carried out.”
However, law enforcers have often disregarded the exemption by prosecuting farmers under different laws. Dewita, for example, was charged under the 1999 Forestry Law, which bans burning in areas officially zoned as forest.
In Jambi province, the ethnic Malay population has traditionally employed merun, a simple form of land management involving machete and fire, which is regulated by customary norms. Jambi’s merun process typically culminates in a small fire, which farmers are required by customary law to monitor to prevent conflagration.
“Merun is like a campfire — the purpose is not to cause destruction,” Daru said.
However, anecdotal testimony on the ground indicates that a push by Indonesia’s central government to address wildfire risks is causing some farmers to abandon merun.
“Clearing land by burning is not only for clearing, but also to ensure soil fertility,” said Rukka Sombolinggi, who leads AMAN, Indonesia’s largest civil society organization for Indigenous rights.
Rukka emphasized that Indigenous farmers typically employ responsible controlled burns to land, and that a state drive to eliminate this practice jeopardizes food security for subsistence cultivators lacking ready alternatives.
Civil society activists have long criticized gaps in the rule of law that have seen hundreds of farmers jailed across the country over the past decade. Meanwhile, plantation companies have typically received only civil and administrative penalties for much larger, more destructive fires that they’re deemed liable of starting or causing.
“The law does not apply equally to the companies where their concession land burns,” Rukka said.
In the year to September 2024, the Jambi provincial police had charged 14 people in the forest and land burning cases. No plantation companies in the province has been subject to criminal penalty in the same period.
Abdullah, executive director of the Jambi chapter of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), said law enforcement prioritizes investigations into small farmers like Dewita.
“Maybe the arrests by the authorities are just to show that they have been doing work,” he said. “But only small farmers were arrested.”

Plantation firms in Jambi including PT Artha Mulia Mandiri and PT Sungai Bahar Pasifik in West Tanjung Jabung district, as well as PT Puri Hijau Lestari in Muaro Jambi district, have yet to incur any criminal charges despite fires on their concessions, Abdullah said.
“Regulations on forest and wildfire management often have no effect on those with economic and political power,” he added. “Political lobbying, close ties with government officials, and abundant financial resources allow these companies to avoid serious legal consequences.”
Several other farmers have faced prosecution in the surrounding area over fires related to agriculture.
Hendri Edward received a 10-month prison sentence and a fine after failing to control a fire in Tebo, while Aman Pasaribu got the same sentence as Dewita.
In the moments before Dewita learned she would be locked for a year and a half, she pleaded with the presiding judge to show leniency.
“I have responsibilities to support and take care of my two children,” Dewita said. “They are still in elementary school.”

Outside the courtroom, her husband, Lasro, 40, looked anxious and said he didn’t know what to tell their children.
He had lost his job in North Sumatra during the COVID-19 pandemic and couldn’t find work to make ends meet for his young family. Later, an acquaintance offered him 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of land in Jambi in a former logging area. Lasro convinced Dewita that the family should move for a new start.
“Our intention to move was to make a better life. We had got a little land,” he said. “But instead, this happened.”
Now he visits his wife in prison, where he brings Dewita medicine as the children hug their mother through prison bars.
“When the kids ask,” he said, “I always say, ‘Mommy will be home soon.’”
Traditional small farmers burned by Indonesia’s war on wildfires
This story was first published here in Indonesian on Dec. 11.