PICTURE this: a government so arrogant, so hubris-bloated that it is prepared to wipe out a million hectares of virgin rainforest to plant rice, despite warnings from scientists that, apart from the grave ecological damage, less than 30 per cent of the area is even suitable for growing the staple crop.
Such a monumental act of stupidity and greed indeed happened in southern Central Kalimantan. The project was the brainchild of pride-filled dictator Suharto, desperate in the mid-1990s to reverse Indonesia's rice deficit that required imports and ready to go to any lengths suggested by cronies and rapacious family members to do it.
Not a single crop was reaped from what was known as the mega-rice project: at least none that would suffice for an evening meal. Plenty of valuable timber ended up as pure profit in the pockets of Jakarta's super-wealthy, however, as the rainforests that once soaked up carbon dioxide were stripped of their bounty, mostly for overseas sale.
Now supporters of the post-Suharto reformasi administration, including Australia, are scrambling to allocate money to redress the fiasco and get some climate-change runs on the board, but grave questions remain over how much of the damage can be undone.
By digging more than 4600km of channels connecting two large rivers that flowed into the Java Sea to the south of Central Kalimantan province and draining the peat-rich rainforest swamp on which the region's delicate ecosystem relied, Suharto's engineers created a catastrophe that scientists say could take several generations to reverse.
"At least 50 years in the least affected areas and hundreds of years in most of it," explains agronomist Suwido Limin. "The hydrographic situation here was changed completely and the peat became extremely sensitive to fire."
The project's aims, in a misguided attempt to produce a wet-rice cultivation system on cleared peatland, ignored the fact the rivers are lower than the rainforest water table, which rises and falls according to the monsoonal cycle. For wet irrigation, the water source needs to be at least as high as the paddy fields. The new canal system, although designed as an irrigation network for the entire area that could flood paddy fields during crop growth and drain them at harvest time, flows only in one direction: out to sea.
It is impossible to re-flood the areas intended to host the rice crops at planting time. The peat - dense layers of partly decomposed vegetation, several metres deep - dried out and left the area useless for agriculture. Further, the project's other main intended effect - easing land shortage in Java, Madura and Sulawesi by offering agricultural space to thousands of people from those islands - failed completely, along with the harvest. The new arrivals then put greater pressure on existing food and other resources.
The only effective way to re-establish the peat, where that is possible at all, is to replant the land with appropriate rainforest species and to dam the canal network to isolate the forests once more from tidal fluctuation.
That's a project being championed by Suwido, Indonesia's foremost expert on peatland biodiversity who runs an international centre for peatland preservation at the University of Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan's capital city.
It's significant that Suwido is a Dayak, the region's dominant ethnic group, which has historically had deep links to the land.
Indonesia's 90 million hectares of forests, which because of their ability to absorb CO2 play such a crucial role in the fight against global warming, are owned by the Government. It awards concessions to logging companies and plantation corporations, in particular those seeking to enter the lucrative palm oil market. Groups such as the Dayaks in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, are legally recognised as having stewardship over their traditional lands, which they typically harvest in sustainable fashion for a range of crops including coffee, rubber, rattan and various timbers. Now in many areas they are fighting back against the forest-clearing that, although it has been going on for decades, took off with the launch of Suharto's scheme in 1995 and has more recently hit warp speed with the palm oil boom, part of the race to produce viable biofuels.
These fuels are supposed to reduce dependence on fossil equivalents and thus tackle global warming head-on; but, ironically, the consensus is that Indonesia's ravaged peatlands and their consequent wildfires have made it the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after the US and China.
A UN report this year suggested that, at present rates, 98 per cent of the country's rainforest will be destroyed within 15 years. The possible extinction of fauna such as orang-utans and tigers is part of the price likely to be paid for global warming.
Alarmed at the prospect, some prominent Kalimantan figures, such as Dayak leader Stone Christopel Sahabu from Cempaga village, several hours north of Palangkaraya, have organised community resistance camps deep in what remains of their forests, armed with traditional weapons and prepared to repel bulldozers and oil palm plantation bosses.
"We'll do this until the end, until we get proper title to the land. Guarding the forests was our responsibility from the beginning," Stone warns from his comfortable village home, where he is helping his wife recover from an infected foot injury and his grandson from a bout of malaria.
"The forest is just as much my home as this is." An official government document gives the lithe and strong 74-year-old authority to take care of - but not ownership of - the nearby 10,000ha he has helped preside through for decades.
It took just one week last year for excavators to turn 6000ha of that land into a oil palm plantation, he says. Now he's trying to work out how to fight the invasion in the courts.
Activists such as Suwido and Stone could prove to be powerful allies for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has hitched his car to the environmental train, the next station being the UN climate change conference in Bali starting on December 3.
At that meeting a successor to the Kyoto Protocol will begin to take shape. Indonesia, with vast natural resources but also expansive power needs, wants to be in for the ride. Australia does too, even though the crucial matter of developing nations signing up to binding targets is likely to derail significant progress, at least in the short term.
In March, Yudhoyono decreed that Central Kalimantan's devastated peatlands be "rehabilitated and revitalised".
The wreckage of the mega-rice project - halted by Suharto's successor B.J. Habibie in 1998 - had contributed several times already to the terrible forest fires that covered Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia in thick smoke during subsequent dry seasons and almost caused diplomatic breakdowns between Jakarta and its northern neighbours.
The fires still burn during the midyear dry. They are especially rapacious because the metres-deep biomass becomes easily combustible once it dries out and the blazes are all but impossible to extinguish.
Only in the wet season, when heavy downpours can continue for hours on end, are fires really smothered. During the worst dry spells, the rich humus smoulders for months, reigniting spontaneously in the fierce heat and producing a pall thick enough to shut down airports and reduce visibility to a few metres.
Yudhoyono knows that tackling his country's rampant deforestation problem is the only way to gain international credibility on the environment, but he also has picked a contentious way of going about it, by joining the so-called Forest Eight group of nations - Brazil, Cameroon, Congo, Costa Rica, Gabon, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea - which want money for agreeing not to cut down certain parts of their rainforests. The concept is called avoided deforestation and it's based on the idea that these developing countries suffer a greater economic loss by keeping forest areas than by mining their wealth and turning the land over to plantations, mines and other industry.
Part of the deal will be a post-Kyoto agreement that brings rainforest-based greenhouse gas emission net cuts into the international carbon-trading regime.
And all of that is precisely where Yudhoyono's project to regenerate the dead peatlands of Central Kalimantan - and Australia's enthusiastic embrace of the plan - comes in.
Scientists believe peat in its natural state - centuries-old, partly decomposed organic matter deep in swampy forests - absorbs carbon dioxide, like trees. When the peat dries and burns, the dense smoke is accompanied by vast amounts of the stored carbon. Tackling that problem - or appearing to be doing so - adds clout on the climate change circuit.
Indonesian scientist Alue Dohong, of Wetlands International, stresses that peatland rehabilitation is not just an Indonesian problem "but a global one because even without the fires these dried-out peatlands are releasing 50 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year into the atmosphere".
The Australian Government's $30 million contribution to a projected $100 million government-industry Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership, to which BHP Billiton has signed up, aims to reforest, reflood and preserve peatland on the Indonesian part of huge Borneo island. Exactly how is not clear: even government officials admit the scheme's detail is still being ironed out and applications closed last week for a Jakarta-based project administrator, who will take up the post in February. However, if the project follows any of the methods of previous Indonesian government rehabilitation efforts, Suwido says, it will almost certainly be a complete waste of money, apart from the image boost for firms such as BHP Billiton, a huge miner in Kalimantan and across the region, as a result of their role in an ostensibly green scheme.
"I don't want a developed nation like Australia to spend all that money for nothing," the scientist explains, gesturing at maps in his office showing the destroyed region. "But if it's anything like what's happened in the past, then I'm really not certain all the money won't just go straight into officials' pockets." Suwido's main criticism is of projects that aim to plant a given number of trees but include no mechanism for measuring their survival rate.
"The Government plants trees, the people look at them and say, 'That's nice', and the trees die," he says, almost furious in his dismay at the lack of accountability still evident in Indonesia. "Then they measure the success of their project by how many trees they have handed out. But how many of those trees have done anything? They say, 'We've replanted so many hectares', but there might in the end be only one tree still living on each of those hectares."
The approach also takes no account of the porous system of oversight on logging and plantation concessions in Indonesia, notoriously rife with corruption and ripe for abuse. Even the country's dwindling national parks are not safe from the greased palms of officials eager for a little extra.
Ever the campaigner, Suwido and his small university centre's staff of 10 have been running a pilot project where villagers in degraded mega-rice districts near Palangkaraya are given a variety of selected trees - a native species of melaleuca, say, which produces a fast-growing timber suitable for building houses - then paid a small amount of money each quarter for every one that remains alive. If the tree dies, they get nothing.
Monitoring the results is labour intensive but economically far more efficient than the Government's schemes as they exist, Suwido argues. "The people feel like they are actually responsible for the trees, which is how they treated the forests before they were wiped out. But the Government (says it's) not interested, because (it's) already rehabilitated two million hectares. Well, show me how many trees are on those two million hectares."
Suryadi, a woman from the small village of Kalampangan where the pilot project is focused, says it is working better than she expected, enabling her to "plant vegetables, especially green beans, although it's not so good when it floods" (a result of the canal drainage system).
Suwido staff member Sahara Alim, one of the workers who helps monitor the several-hectare trial plots cared for by villagers such as Suryadi, is as vehement as his boss in support of the idea, taking Inquirer into the field to demonstrate the project at work.
"Look, mega-rice was never really about rice anyway," he says. "It was about looting the timber. And, frankly, palm oil is not much better. But this way people at least get to feel they have their land back. The local government does site surveys and rehabilitation projects in areas where they know there will be no scrutiny. They don't plant anything, they don't do anything.
"The people are sick of this fake rehabilitation, sick of being lied to."
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