NTFPs in the Rain Forest of West Kalimantan, Indonesia

by Yayasan Dian Tama

Partners:

Yayasan Dian Tama (YDT) P.D. Dian Niaga Appropriate Technology International (ATI) Social Forestry Development Project (SFDP-GTZ)

Success Stories

In the village of Terusan, rattan was formerly utilized only to weave baskets for private use and was regularly destroyed in the opening of new swiddens. Local people are now, however, planting bamboo and rattan plants. This is a very positive step as it demonstrates the will of the local people to think forward, particularly as the rattan planted now can only be harvested seven years from now.

Challenges

Among the PFMA forest communities, time off from school during the dry season is commonly spent tapping, processing and selling rubber in order to earn enough money to pay for the upcoming school semester. When the rubber tapping season was to begin, the dry season became a very wet one and tapping became impossible.

In the meantime, Dian Tama had been requesting damar samples for over one year, an offer which had no takers. That is, until rain fell during the rubber tapping season and families in villages throughout the PFMA spent the rainy days collecting damar and delivering it to local traders in Bantai village where the Dian Tama field office is located. Dian Tama staff who were in Bantai at the time report meeting people walking from the forest collection sites to Bantai with as much as 30 kilograms of damar on their heads and meeting them again on the way back to their villages with basic supplies and school uniforms in their baskets. In the words of Dian Tama's director, "A year of fishing without a catch can become a flood of fish overnight."

The primary challenge faced by Dian Tama in the implementation of this project concerns 1) the relationship between organizations active in the PFMA which calls for unprecedented coordination and cooperation, and 2) the related need for procedures and regulations to facilitate and monitor enterprise development and trading within the PFMA. In Dian Tama's experience, the implementation of this project is serving to act as a catalyst such that these procedures and regulations be developed and the very young organization responsible for the coordination and implementation of such regulations in the PFMA readies itself to deal with the needs of cooperating organizations, such as Dian Tama and locally active traders. Right now Dian Tama is in the midst of obtaining the necessary permission to extract and trade damar from the PFMA. However, as the process is still a long one in these early stages of damar trading, Dian Tama is faced with the difficult situation of developing contacts with potential buyers for a large amount of damar which does not yet have the permission to leave the Bantai storage unit.

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