Saving lives and forests through cooperation

Way back in 2003, TFT was asked by Perhum Perhutani, the Indonesian State-owned Teak Corporation, to help it get its FSC certificates back. It had been one of the first tropical forest operations to receive the FSC badge for sustainable forest management - as early as 1996 if I remember correctly - but it had recently lost them as a result of uncontrolled illegal logging.

There had always been controversy surrounding their FSC certificates. NGO advocates pointed out that Perhutani Rangers regularly shot and killed community members engaged in illegal logging activity. They argued that any wood products made from Perhutani’s teak was stained with blood. They had a point.

We said we would help but with one proviso - that all 4,000 semi-automatic weapons used by the Perhutani Rangers to protect themselves and the teak would have to be removed from the forests.

They said, "OK," and so commenced our work together, in two Districts to get things right.

By 2009, all their FSC certificates were reinstated, but that was never our goal.

Our goal was to build cooperation between disenfranchised communities and the Perhutani Rangers so that there'd be no more shootings or deaths in any of their total 57 Districts, covering 2 million hectares on the island of Java, the most densely populated island in the world. Irrespective of any certification process, we wanted to embed long-term cooperation and care into Perhutani/community relations.

By 2009, all 4,000 guns were locked away in arsenals and have remained there since. Before our intervention in 2003, one community member had been shot, on average, each year, and one had been killed every 18 months. No one has been killed since 2009.

Best of all, benefit sharing agreements have now long been in place that have seen the communities become the forests' guardians while securing income to build new community infrastructure.

It was a counterintuitive outcome that no one had previously imagined possible.

TFT/Earthworm Foundation staff, the communities and Perhutani's people made it possible.

To celebrate its 25th birthday, Earthworm is recording a series of videos about some of the projects it's been involved with in that time.

They recently interviewed me for their newsletter and have produced this video where I talk through the history of the Perhutani/community conflict and what was done to resolve it.

I hope you enjoy it. The Earthworm comms team have done a cracking job with it. There are some rich lessons in there about how to build cooperation in the face of conflict and violence.