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Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java

University of California Press

Claim and counterclaim had been the condition of forest life for centuries. . . . Farmers and forest officers had rubbed along together, in a state of running conflict, for many decades and they were to continue to do so for many more. . . . What was at issue was not land use but who used the land: that is, power and property right.
E. P. THOMPSON , Whigs and Hunters

Mantri Kasran used to fire his gun into the air to scare off thieves. People would flee and his assistants would come running. Then one day, about five years ago, he was surrounded while walking near a village in the leak forest. He described his "captors" as "a gang of rowdy leak thieves, some fifty to one hundred strong, many of them wielding hoes, dibble sticks, machete-like knives, and other agricultural implements." They circled around him, cursing rudely. He couldn't fire his gun; it would be just the excuse they needed to attack him, blaming him, as usual, for doing his job as forest guard. Luckily one of his assistants, who lived in the nearby village, heard the commotion and ran to get help. Kasran stalled the mob for what seemed at least an hour, until a logging truck filled with forest police pulled up. He climbed aboard and they drove away very slowly, easing by the villagers, who milled around the truck angrily as it pulled out.

Despite this close call, Kasran says he is not afraid to walk in the teak forest. He doesn't have to look over his shoulder. He has to be brave; he is a forester. But several months after the showdown, he moved his family out of their forest-based home, closer to the capital of the forest district.

He boasted about the incident in late 1984, in reference to the ongoing conflicts between the foresters and the villagers who refuse to understand "the meaning and function of the forest." Returning from a forest development project where some sixty-eight families had been given limited access to forest land for agriculture—in an area with more than four thousand landless rural households—he said, "People's mental attitudes [sikap mental ] need to be adjusted so they are appropriate to the

forest's needs. We [foresters] have to raise people's consciousness about the forest. We need to teach them. The problem is not the forest. The problem is that the people are hungry for land." Then he said, "As a person, I want to help them. But as a representative of the State Forestry Corporation, I must say that we are not a social welfare organization. We are a business—in the business of conservation. On the other hand, it is the task of our whole country to take care of the forest."

This excerpt from a conversation with Mantri Kasran encapsulates the conflict between foresters and forest villagers in Java. Competition over access to land and trees, and over the control of that access, characterizes the relations between these two sets of forest users. Claims and counterclaims, threats and counterthreats, and struggles to support diametrically opposed production-consumption units—forest-based households and a powerful forestry parastatal—are the stuff of forest politics. So is the violence that erupts periodically or underlies the public relationships between the forest players.

Historically, the state, the peasantry, and other external interests have acted out their tensions in the natural theater of the forest. The potential for sustainable management of a given forest is partially a function of the manner in which these players have pursued their interests—and the degree of convergence or opposition between them. Where the interests of states and peasants clash, we often find environmental deterioration, poverty, and ambivalent power relations. The history of state forestry and actual forest use points to the tensions over access and control between the state and the peasantry. These struggles leave their mark by damaging valuable, vulnerable, land-based resources, even in areas where so-called scientific principles of forest management have been in place for more than a century. These are the environmental ramifications of conflict between rural people and foresters.

Sustainable production as defined by a forestry enterprise is not necessarily sustainable from the point of view of forest villagers. The current crises in tropical forests derive from inappropriate institutions, particularly those governing systems of resource access and control. No one source can be blamed for forest depletion or degradation; rather, the deterioration of land-based resources constitutes the culmination of complex interactions between shifting interests. An environmental solution to degradation cannot exist apart from the people and societies who use that environment legally or illegally; degradation itself is a value- and interest-laden term (Dove 1984; Blaikie 1985). Analyses of sustainability must include social and political sustainability.

This book describes the history of state forestry policies designed to control forest land, tree species, labor, and ideology in Java, Indonesia,

and the responses of forest villagers to those controls. Over time, state-imposed changes in forest access rights have affected not only subsequent policy formation and implementation but also the forms of peasant resistance to state control. In some forests, these changes have caused losses of trees and changed the capacities of certain forest lands to grow those species; in others, forest land has been effectively converted to peasant agriculture. Both conditions are called deforestation by foresters. In both settings, deforestation results from conflict, confrontation, and resistance.

Most studies of Indonesian forests have focused on the so-called Outer Islands (which include Sumatra, Kalimantan, and West Irian), where 97 percent of Indonesia's forests are found.1 Java, in contrast, is known as a rice-producing tropical island. Yet one-fourth of Java's land is legally classified as state forest, and Java is where state forest management began in Indonesia. It is also where precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial state policies have left the deepest marks on the forest and forest-based communities. The island's critical contribution to Indonesia's food supply, its two-hundred-year history of intensive forest exploitation, its high population density, and its differentiated rural social structure create an interesting and appropriate setting for studying the dynamics of center-periphery relations at the interface of forest policy and forest use.

Moreover, timber plantations and the Javanese model of management are being imitated throughout Indonesia and in other parts of the forested tropics. The analysis of the evolution of Javanese forest policy and use is thus relevant not only to the specific problem of forest conflict and degradation on a single island, but also to emerging conflicts in other forested regions. Natural tropical forests are being converted to monocultural forest plantations after damaging episodes of forest exploitation by foreign and domestic firms. The shutting out of rural people and the misunderstanding of the motives underlying peasants' uses of the forest are also being repeated. Ironically, environmentalists' outrage over mismanaged...