Forest Products 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

Pak Sunda, 33, lives in Periji, one of the villages that has trained weavers for the rattan production. Originally a slash and burn farmer, Pak struggled to make a living. Although he worked in the field for eight to nine months, his farm yielded only enough food for four to five months of the year. So in order to meet his basic needs, he also worked as a rubber tapper in his neighbor's field. By 1994 he had two children to feed as well and he was having a very hard time making ends meet. When the weaving training started, Pak Sunda became very interested in joining, even though most of the other weavers were women. He followed his feeling that weaving could make him a good income. Since then, he has become a leader of his village's weaving group and a trainer for weavers -- not only in his own village, but he helps YDT train weavers in other villages as well.

Pak Sunda's life has changed from being a slash and burn farmer, to becoming a group motivator and entrepreneur in weaving. Now he is the quality supervisor for all products that his village group produces -- a group which started with four members and now numbers 22. The members pay Pak Sunda because he helps them in many ways. He collects rattan for the group and is always finding new ways to teach them how to increase the quality. Under his leadership, the skills of the group members are slowly but surely improving and so is the quality of their products.

Pak Sunda also understand the limitation of rattan resources in his area. He actively urges the weavers to plant rattan on their farms to provide for the future. Each family is collecting rattan seeds and has planted between 50 to 100 plants which is not much, but it is a start.

After three years, Pak Sunda smiles at progress that has taken place. Under new kerosene pressure lamps, people are happily weaving and chatting. And as the production increases, their income also increases. Recently Pak returned from a month in Jakarta where he worked at a major exhibition demonstrating Kalimantan weaving techniques to people in the big city. He was very proud to be chosen as the representative. Hard work gets its reward.

Challenges

There is a story about a blind man who owns and makes a living from his store. Because he is blind, whenever somebody comes to buy something, he doesn't know whether he has it or not, or how many he has, much less where it is, or what is the right price to ask for it.

When first we started the BCN project, we felt like that blind man with his store. We have the 'store' -- 100,000 hectare within the Participatory Forest Management Area with 17,000 people living in it -- but we don't know what kind of specific 'things' are there, where and how much stock we have, or the potential for growth or annual yield. We don't know what exactly what there is to harvest, nor at what levels it would be sustainable.

Using transect methods, the natural resources inventory has been completed. We know the species and the amount of each in the transect. But it still difficult to find out how many damar trees or rattan clumps there are, their growth rate, or how much can be harvested. We do not know what to base the calculations on to determine the potential yield of each non-timber forest product. Our dream -- knowing what the sustainable harvest level is -- is still far off, and maybe we won't know for another year or two.

Even though the transects are established within the forest management area, and there are local villagers that know how to do the monitoring, the information we need from the biologicalecological monitoring will take longer than the time we have left in the time of life of the project which ends in 1998. So how will we be able to continue?

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