Development and Change - October 1992 - Peluso - The Political Ecology of Extraction and Extractive Reserves in East

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The Political Ecology of Extraction and

Extractive Reserves in East Kalimantan,
Indonesia
Nancy Lee Peluso
ABSTRACT
Extractive reserves established in the Amazon have given development profes-

sionals hope for solving two critical problems in conservation and develop-
ment: the empowerment of indigenous people and the conservation of tropical
forests. The extraction of non-timber forest products has provided an impor-
tant part of the livelihood strategies of rainforest dwelling people and of the
regional economy of East Kalimantan for some two millennia. The specific
political-economic and environmental circumstances of Indonesia and
interior Kalimantan, however, preclude applying the Amazonian model for
extractive reserves. Using a political ecology framework, this article analyses
sociological and environmental factors emerging over the past two and a half
decades and influencing contemporary rattan production and trade. Based on
this analysis, the author concludes that the politics of forest management, at
both the national and local levels, are more conducive to village level extrac-
tive reserves than to regional, labour-based organizations.
INTRODUCTION
The extraction of non-timber products from tropical forests has

been the subject of a great deal of attention in academic, conserva-
tion and development circles of late (Hecht et al., 1988; Hecht and
Cockburn, 1989; de Beer and McDermott, 1989; Clay, 1988). The
notion of extractive reserves, in which an area of existing rainforest
is set aside for low-impact use by certain residents of that rainforest
or its environs has seemed particularly attractive (Schwartzman,
1989). Extractors (or ‘extractavists’ as they have been called by
some in what seems to be no more than a grammatically incorrect
Development und Chonge (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 23
(1992) NO. 4, 49-74.
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50 Nancy Lee Peluso
translation of the original Spanish extructivos) are local rainforest

users who have long-term claims to the resources of the forest, often
because they have invested labour in managing those resources in
documented or in less visible ways.
While the establishment of extractive reserves promises to provide
solutions to two related issues in conservation and development -
the empowerment, or re-empowerment, of indigenous people and
the conservation of tropical forests - it is risky to assume that the
Amazonian model can be pasted on to any area in the tropics where
indigenous people collect forest products for subsistence or com-
mercial use. Without an understanding of the specific historical cir-
cumstances leading to current patterns of forest management, use
and control, the most well-meaning extractive reserves may fail and
cast undue shadows on the development strategy as a whole.
In this article, I discuss the political ecology of forest extraction
in East Kalimantan, Indonesia (Indonesian Borneo) as a basis for
understanding potential constraints on creating extractive reserves
in a specificpolitical-economic context. For Kalimantan, the notion
of extractive reserves is an attractive one, particularly given the
rapidity with which the province’s forests are being logged, while
local people continue to lose de jure and de facto controls over the
forest territories they occupy. However, the specifics of the region’s
recent political-economic and environmental history foreshadow
difficulties in defining and enforcing access rights for indigenous
forest collectors. Village extractive reserves would be more practical
and effective than the region-wide, labour organizations of forest
extractors characteristic of Amazonian rainforest reserves.
Although numerous commercial or potentially commercial forest
products could have been used to frame the historical discussion, I
focus on the political ecology of rattan (Culurnus spp.) because it is
familiar to a wide audience, it is important for local use and local
trade as well as for export and because it has become a star among
Indonesia’s non-oil and non-timber exports within the last two
decades. In this article I explain some of the traditional forms of
rattan management in East Kalimantan, including village controls
on access to rattan resources, and outline the social relations
between collectors and traders. The following section covers the key
political-economic changes of the 1970s and 1980s that have com-
bined to threaten many East Kalimantan rattan sources.’ This
discussion focuses on conjunctures and changes in the forestry
sector and in the structure of access and control over rattane2
Political Ecology in East Kalimantan 51
Finally, I discuss the legal and sociological issues that must be con-
sidered if extractive reserves are to be created in rattan-producing
areas of East Kalimantan.
The approach used in the article is political ecology, examining
first the resource-related actions of local people and then linking
them both to their webs of local social relations and to the broader
political-economic setting. Political ecology is a term that has
gained popularity in recent years, generally in reference to
political-economic analyses of the environment that incorporate
some discussion of the actions of resource users and their linkages
to the broader processes that structure the social and physical
environments in which they act (Blaikie, 1985; Hecht, 1985; Watts,
1983; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Schmink and Wood, 1987;
Thrupp, 1990). It is more a method of analysis than a theory, per
se. Political ecology is similar to a method applied by human
ecologists analysing policy-relevant environmental questions, that
is, ‘progressive contextualization’ (Vayda, 1983). Both approaches
start with the actors, in this case direct resource users, and consider
the contexts within which they act or do not act in a particular way
towards a resource. Both approaches intend to explain why people
use the environment in particular ways, sometimes causing resource
decline or degradation detrimental to their own and others’ uses of
the resources.
There are two critical differences, however, in the two
approaches. One is that political ecology emphasizes the social rela-
tions within which actors are embedded and which affect the ways
they use the environment rather than the collective human-
environment interactions of a set of individuals. The other major
difference is that political ecology assumes that larger social struc-
tures and political-economic processes will affect the actions of
local resource users (see, especially, Blaikie, 1985). These structures
and processes are examined in a more systematic manner, therefore,
than in progressive contextualization. It is not the purpose of this
paper to review these two approaches; a recent paper by Neumann
(1992) has done an excellent job of reviewing the evolution of
political ecology, while Vayda’s (1983) paper outlines progressive
contextualization.
52 Nancy Lee Peluso
THE POLITICS OF ACCESS TO FOREST PRODUCTS:

AN INTRODUCTION
Commercial and subsistence forest extraction make substantial con-

tributions to rural people’s livelihoods throughout the Indonesian
archipelago. Many forest products are collected for their use value
or local trade: medicinal plants, animals for meat, skins and body
parts, resins for boat caulking and fuel, honey, forest fruits, palm
sugar and sago for food; rattan and other fibres for construction,
basketry, food and other subsistence uses. Early collectors and
traders of tree resins, camphor, edible bird’s nests and incense
woods were integrated into broad regional exchange networks,
extending from China to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, cen-
turies before European mercantile adventurers or natural historians
ventured into the region. The forests of Borneo have been key
supply regions for this worldwide trade in non-timber forest pro-
ducts for two millennia (Hall, 1985: 25).
Many pre-colonial maritime states of Southeast Asia, founded
and maintained by trade, rose and fell according to their ability to
control access to the bounty of the forests in their hinterlands
(Tromp, 1887; Hall, 1985; Wolters, 1967). As recently as the nine-
teenth century the control of forest access was relatively straightfor-
ward. A powerful claimant such as a sultan could place a tax
collector at the river’s mouth or toss a rattan stem or liana across the
confluence of two rivers to prevent entry (Bock, 1881). Sultans in
the coastal kingdoms made alliances with Dayak leaders in the
interior, augmenting their supplies of forest products from the most
remote forests (Tromp, 1887). Similarly, claimants to the limestone
caves where swiftlets (Collocalia spp.) built their valuable nests, or
to clumps of rattan in the forest, or to resin-producing trees,
adhered to locally enforced rules of usufruct, all of which were
embedded within particular social relationships governing claims to
and harvest of forest products (Jessup and Peluso, 1986). To back
these secular regulatory structures, people could recite magic spells
to protect their property. In contemporary Indonesia, by contrast,
traditional rights and local controls over the products of the forest
have become entangled in a morass of government regulations and
access laws imposed by a highly centralized state committed to rapid
and large-scale exploitation of its natural resources.
Forest users in Kalimantan range from Punan hunter-gatherers
and tribal groups of swidden agriculturalists loosely classified as
‘Dayaks’, to various people descended from the ‘coastal Malay’

groups (for example, the Kutai and Banjar people) that probably
migrated to Kalimantan between the eleventh and fourteenth cen-
turies. Each of these ‘indigenous’ groups has different and localized
histories and often exhibits slightly different patterns of forest
management, forest product collection and participation in the
forest products trade. Today, they interact not only with each other
but also with Chinese and Bugis migrants who have arrived within
the past century or two, and with the more numerous transmigrants,
contract labourers and free labourers from Java, Bali or Lombok.
Labourers from other islands have been attracted to the region to
participate in the timber and oil industries, and in the non-timber
forest products trade.
The reason for the region’s popularity among migrants and
investors both large and small lies largely in its natural resource
wealth: Kalimantan has majestic forests, numerous oil fields and a
network of great rivers that have served as its highways for cen-
turies. Resource extraction has been embedded within every part of
this region’s history, but until the 1960s most of it was undertaken
on a small and localized scale and at such a slow pace that the
regeneration of forest products was rarely perceived as a problem.
Since 1967, however, the Indonesian state has embarked on a
strategy of aggressive industrial resource development in East
Kalimantan, as elsewhere in the country. Exercising its effective
rights of eminent domain as first declared by the Dutch colonists’
Domeinverklaring in 1860 and reiterated by the Basic Agrarian Law
of 1960 and the Basic Forestry Law of 1967, the government has
divided the territorial rights to forests among timber conces-
sionaires, plantations and transmigration projects. In addition, land
has been set aside for national parks, wildlife reserves and watershed
protection areas. These land-extensive projects target different
kinds of forest products for production or protection, but have
denied the existence of village forest management in the form of
local institutions regulating the extraction of forest products, par-
ticularly non-timber forest products (NTFPs).
The forests of East Kalimantan thus epitomize the mess of formal
forestry controls superimposed on ‘traditional’ forms of forest
access. Forestry policy directed at timber management has increased
the volume of rattan produced at the risk of its extensive depletion.
The rattan trade was virtually out of control in the late 1970s
and 1980s. Moreover, migrants t o East Kalimantan from all over
54 Nancy Lee Peluso
Indonesia neither understand nor heed the traditions of indigenous

people, either ignoring the traditional rights of access or failing to
recognize the less visible forms of forest management. Many have
turned to forest extraction when they face crises of reproduction,
unable to accumulate the surpluses they anticipated in the jobs that
initially attracted them, as loggers, contract plantation labour or
transmigrants. Many have survived their personal crises by imitating
the diverse and flexible survival strategies of Kalimantan’s indi-
genous people but without applying time-worn local controls on
production. They exploit whatever forest products are demanded on
local and export markets, dealing in cash with ad hoc traders and
ignoring village resource territories. The result is that Kalimantan’s
potential ‘subsidy from nature’ (Hecht et al., 1988), is being threat-
ened by direct and indirect pressures from individuals, corpora-
tions, the state and the market. Newcomers are changing the nature
of NTFP management from a common property arrangement with
rules of access and sanctions for transgressors to an open access
situation beyond effective control. Played out in the forest, this is
how changes in both the political-economic setting and in local
systems of access and control today threaten the sources of non-
timber forest products and the livelihoods of forest dwelling people.
MANAGEMENT OF RATTAN: PRODUCTION, PROTECTION

AND CLAIMS
Rattan is managed in various ways throughout the province. Rattan

gardens, where rattan is planted alongside other economic and
useful species, are common in the southern parts of the province
(Pasir district) and along the Mahakam river. In some of the same
areas, and elsewhere, management systems are based on limited
harvest regulations, in which a certain percentage of the harvestable
stems are taken in one year and the rest are left for subsequent years.
Depending on the species and its expected regeneration, this percen-
tage cut is generally 10-20 per cent of the total rattan in a single
clump or along a section of the root-stem. Collection is sometimes
done by the owners - in this case either the planters or the
claimants (managers) of natural rattan - or by sharecroppers or
wage labourers. The canes are dried in the sun and sold to village
shopkeepers, village middlemen or tradeboat operators, who sell the
rattan downriver (Peluso, 1983b).
Rattan collection is generally a part-time activity, engaged in by

various members of peasant or labouring households, who work
individually or in groups. Collection is only one of a variety of
economic activities. As the opportunities to engage in these activities
fluctuate in accordance with the rhythms and vagaries of the
seasons, the market, the agricultural cycle or the weather, so do the
circumstances within which rattan collectors decide to collect rattan.
Other factors affecting rattan collection include the property rights
to rattan, the availability of land for shifting cultivation, the poten-
tial collector’s access to and relationships with rattan buyers, the
necessity of working in small groups for rattan collection and the
collector’s knowledge of rattan ecology (Dunn, 1975; Vayda, 1983;
Jessup and Peluso, 1986; Peluso, 1983a).
Like its management strategies, the rights of access to rattan fit
into the general pattern of rights to a myriad of forest products
available t o Dayak and other ethnic communities of East Kaliman-
tan. Rights to the products of the forest range from parts of trees
claimed by individuals to village claims over resources within a par-
ticular forest territory (Jessup and Peluso, 1986). Village residents
recognize forest territories within which they are entitled to use most
forest products as the common property of the village. In addition,
households have exclusive rights to certain products or certain uses
of forest land within that village’s territory (Weinstock, 1979; Dove,
1985; Jessup and Peluso, 1986). Territorial boundaries were
formerly established and defended in some instances by force (war-
fare and headhunting), in others by negotiation and the sale of rights
between neighbouring groups (Jessup, 1989). These boundaries
were sometimes enforced by third parties, such as the paramount
chiefs in the Apo Kayan during the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. More recently, arbitrators’ roles have been divided between
traditional leaders and government officials. The types of resources
that can be claimed and owned by households seem to be those that
are most predictable in their locations and temporal availability.
Kinship is also an important factor underlying access and control
of forest products, in terms of both contemporary and future
use, for instance, through inheritance (Jessup and Peluso, 1986:
5 17- 18).
56 Nancy Lee Peluso
THE LOCAL POLITICS OF RATLAN COLLECTION AND

TRADE
Traditionally, village people traded local rattans to riverboat or

village-based middlemen, who then traded it on to its final urban
destination at an exporter or a processing factory. The exchange and
production relations between trade network participants ranged
from capitalist relations at the later stages to pre-capitalist relations
at the origins. Collectors were traditionally tied to particular mid-
dlemen, and middlemen to higher order traders, through debt:
individuals would purchase subsistence and trade goods on credit
from village shopkeepers or river middlemen to whom they were
then obligated to sell their collected forest produce. The shopkeeper
or middleman set the prices on the goods and the rattan at the time
of its delivery. Price setting was easier in the days preceding the
timber boom when fewer traders plied the rivers and most enjoyed
more or less monopsonistic relationships3with the collectors in cer-
tain locales (Peluso, 1983b).
The prices on rattan, like other forest products, vary according to
the supply and demand experienced by the trader (passed on to him
by other traders along the network), and are manipulated by traders
when they receive the rattan from their client collectors. Different
prices are paid according to the shopkeeper’s classification of the
rattan as ‘wet’ or ‘dry’, and according to the length of the stems, with
longer stems or strips bringing higher price^.^ Increasingly tight
government controls on rattan exports have also caused prices to
fluctuate wildly: when the government first announced its intentions
to ban the export of semi-processed rattan in the mid-1970s (see
discussion below), prices rose while traders stocked as much as they
could. Just before the ban, local prices plummeted to half their pre-
ban value, partly because the ban was implemented 6 months earlier
than planned. Rattan garden owners refused to allow rattan collec-
tors access to their living stocks because cutting was so unprofitable
(J.H. Mayer, pers. comm., 1989).
In 1979-80, I observed patterns of co-operation and collusion
among traders working out of the same villages or along the same
tributaries. Traders could afford to co-operate because the structure
of their access to forest products is vertical, through one or a series
of middlemen to the collectors. While they compete on one level for
access to collectors, they can protect themselves and each other
through debt or patron-client type relationships with collectors and
collusion with other traders. Co-operation and price setting are thus
evident between traders working at different stages in the trade net-
work. This co-operation is largely intended to protect traders from
delinquent collectors not selling their produce to the traders to
whom they are indebted, and may have arisen in response to the
breakdown of monopsony in the most easily accessible parts of the
river system.
Most traders stock their shops or boats with goods acquired on
credit from stores or from wholesale suppliers in the towns or large
villages at river confluences. When buying a boat, the operator may
be financed by an urban investor. With the exception of collectors
and their patrons, or urban buyers and their agents or suppliers, pat-
terns of credit extension among the riverboat operators I observed
in 1979-80 were frequently stratified along ethnic lines. Bugis boats
were financed with loans from Bugis entrepreneurs and Chinese
boats by Chinese investors. There were few, if any, Dayak entre-
preneurs with the capital to finance this kind of venture, the occa-
sional Dayak tradeboat operator being financed by investors of
other ethnicities. In all these cases, the recipients of such invest-
ments felt the obligation to d o business with their benefactors or to
perform other services, such as employing their kinsmen or friends,
for some time after the debt was repaid. In some instances, infor-
mants reported feeling that their moral obligations would last a
lifetime (Peluso, 1983b).
Forest collectors have always resisted the traders’ price controls
by soaking whole rattans to make them weigh more or by hiding
green stems (normally considered ‘reject’ quality) in the middle of
rattan bundles. Most recently, the increase in the number of traders
without a long-term interest in sustaining trading activities (‘ad hoe‘
traders) has opened new opportunities for collectors to sell their pro-
ducts for cash (Peluso, 1983b). Judging by the distances which col-
lectors say they must travel to find rattan, this has clearly had a
negative effect on the forest sources. In some cases, collector groups
travel for several days by small motor boat to reach sufficient collec-
ting grounds. On the other hand, it has benefited the collectors
by making them less bound by debt relations. Trader collusion
becomes more difficult as cash transactions become increasingly
common, particularly in the most accessible villages, i.e. those
downriver or close to major riverboat stops. One result of this has
been the trend for traders or their agents to accompany their collec-
tors (usually in groups) into the forest, where they collect for a week
58 Nancy Lee Peluso
or more at one time. Provisions are supplied by the trader; at the end
of the collecting expedition the trader takes possession of and pays
for the rattan in cash or goods based o n his valuation of the wet rat-
tan, minus the cost of provisions consumed in the forest.
Such trends deriving from the expansion and increasing commer-
cialization of rattan do not bode well for efforts to sustain produc-
tion of wild rattan and other forest products. However, while this
has surely increased the depletion rate of natural supplies of wild
rattan, it may also be creating incentives for planting more rattan
in home or forest gardens. Moreover, at the time of writing, the
long-term effects of the latest ban on semi-processed rattan exports
had not yet been felt. The smuggling of large quantities of raw rat-
tan has been reported in Indonesian newspapers (Kompas, July
1989), while the legal trade is reportedly suffering (J.H. Mayer,
pers. comm., 1989).
Patterns of forest or resource access, control and management are
strongly influenced by political-economic structures. Moreover,
any efforts to restrict access to delimited groups of people (for
instance in the form of extractive reserves) must contend with these
structures. The following discussion of the evolution of regional
events leading to the crowding of trade networks within East
Kalimantan provides insights into the structural features impinging
on future extractive reserves in the province’s forests.
CONJUNCTURES AND CHANGES AFFECTING

COLLECTION AND TRADE OF RATTAN: THE 1970s
The collection and trading of rattan have become progressively

more lucrative since the conjuncture of several political, economic
and social changes during the late 1960s and 1970s. The first of these
was the dramatic ideological and structural change in Indonesia
between the post-independence Sukarno and Suharto regimes.
Under Suharto’s New Order, large-scale industrial capitalist
development, often foreign financed, was highly favoured and pro-
moted, changing for ever the thrust of forestry policy and forest use.
The second was the influence of international market forces interac-
ting with East Kalimantan ecological circumstances, showing the
region to be a potential world leader for commercial rattan produc-
tion. Third was the laying of a foundation conducive to direct
foreign investment in the industrial production of manufactured
rattan goods: each of these is addressed below.

Until 1967, timbering for export had been minimal in East
Kalimantan. Foreign investment law No. 1/1967, one of the first
acts - and arguably the most significant - of the Suharto regime,
changed irreversibly the balance between the relative volumes and
values of timber and non-timber forest products in East Kaliman-
tan. It also altered the allocation of labour, the nature of relations
between woodcutters and buyers, and the accessibility to outsiders
of village controlled resources. At first, manual logging techniques
(banjir kap) and manual woodcutting teams dominated the
industry; in 1968 only two mechanized logging operations were at
work in East Kalimantan. While it lasted, manual logging benefited
everyone involved. Small, medium and large concessions were given
out to domestic firms by both the provincial and the central govern-
ments; Japanese buyers came to Samarinda and Balikpapan and
provided a large proportion of the total capital investment in logs
to local traders (Manning, 1971). These traders in turn, most of
them also urban-based, provided working capital in the forms of
credit and cash to buyers and woodcutters upriver. Woodcutters
came from all over Indonesia to participate in the boom and droves
of local people sought a share in the massive amounts of cash
brought in by the new investment activities. Manual logging was so
lucrative that people not only shifted their part-time collection
activities from NTFP, but many deserted their entire repertoires of
subsistence and economic activities (including shifting cultivation)
to join in the timber cutting and trade stimulated by the boom, while
urban businessmen invested capital upriver and earned huge profits
in the infant logging industry.
In late 1971, the government implemented a blanket restriction on
manual logging which was strictly enforced. This was a response not
only to the Japanese buyers’ refusal to purchase hand-cut logs
(because of their lower quality) but also to the change in the political
economy of timber production. Concessions allocated by the pro-
vincial governments were phased out as too difficult to control. The
government lost a great deal of capital as a result of the Japanese
boycott of hand-cut logs: losses in East Kalimantan alone amounted
to 400,000 cubic meters of unsold logs by August 1971 (Manning,
1971).
The ban on manual logging caused hundreds of upriver operations
to be closed before collecting on debts, and many investors expe-
rienced devastating losses. Those who had invested conservatively
60 Nancy Lee Peluso
were able to pull out or switch to trading in non-timber forest pro-

ducts: rattan and damar (resin) production and trade were primary
targets for this switch. Small-scale traders who had not invested
their surpluses in capital goods such as boats or shops were still in
need of credit to support themselves while they made the switch to
trading rattan, resins and other NTFPs. Thousands of manual
woodcutters lost a critical and prolific source of cash. Local people
returned to their agricultural and other collection activities; the
greatly expanded population of migrants without employment in
industrial timber operations, however, posed a new threat to their
supplies of NTFPs. The structural controls placed on access to
timber and the granting of timber-management rights to powerful
non-local interests reinforced local people’s dependence on non-
timber forest products. Collectors could still engage in part-time
logging as wage labourers, although many had to travel long
distances to be hired. The commercial boom accompanying timber
also increased the demand for non-timber forest products and
improved the means of transporting them out of the forest (Peluso,
1983a)’while the altered organization of forest production resulted
in the rapid expansion of credit along the trading networks, and
increased competition for creditors as well as suppliers of forest
products.
The second event which put pressure on East Kalimantan’s rattan
resources was the increase in world demand for rattan at precisely
the time when other sources were being depleted and restricted.
Perhaps the most critical loss to world supplies came in 1977 when
the Philippines banned the export of unprocessed rattan. Between
1976 and 1977, the export price of East Kalimantan rattan doubled,
while the value of all rattan exported from East Kalimantan
increased by 340 per cent. Between 1977 and 1978, the rattan price
tripled and exports increased another 280 per cent (Jessup and
Peluso, 1986: 512). From then on, prices rose steadily until 1988,
with slight monthly fluctuations underlying the general upward
trend, the benefits of the increases being felt by collectors as well as
exporters.
Table 1 shows rattan exports from Indonesia over nearly two
decades; East Kalimantan is one of the major suppliers for the coun-
try and the proportional increase in exports is indicative of increased
activity in the province’s rattan collection and trade.
The third important change adding value and impetus to rattan
collecting in the region started in the 1970s and continued into the
Table 1. Exports of Rattan from Indonesia, 1971-87

(metric tonnes)
Year Raw and semi-processed Matting and basketry Furniture Total
1971 32,150 32,150

1972 47,230 47,230
1973 43,320 43,320
1974 53,500 53,500
1975 42,800 220 43,020
1976 57,350 320 57,670
1977 74,760 330 75,090
1978 69,540 420 69,960
1979 102,840 1080 103,920
1980 79,880 970 80,850
1981 67,400 400 100 67,900
1982 75,900 700 50 75,650
1983 81,200 700 600 82,500
1984 89,770 800 700 91,270
1985 87,900 1400 600 89,900
1986 104,500 2400 2000 108,900
1987 130,340 7500 5400 143.240
Source: Central Bureau of Statistics, cited in de Beer and McDermott (1989).
1980s. This was the increase of foreign investment, particularly by

the Japanese, in rattan carpeting and matting’ factories in South
Kalimantan Province.6 This kind of investment was in its infancy
when I met with manufacturers in Banjarmasin in mid-1980; by
1989 the rattan carpet business was one of the most prominent and
lucrative types of enterprise in Banjarmasin and Amuntai, South
Kalimantan (J.H. Mayers, pers. comm., 1989). The Asian Develop-
ment Bank (1988: A1-27) reported 63 rattan carpet manufacturers
in South Kalimantan alone.’
Manufacturing developments in South Kalimantan have had a
serious impact on rattan supplies in East Kalimantan, including
those grown in the famous rattan gardens of Pasir, once held up as
shining examples of sustainable agro-forestry systems (Weinstock,
1983). Recent reports indicate that rattan garden owners in Bentian
and Pasir are being harassed by gangs of youthful rattan cutters
from outside their local regions who demand access to the gardens.
When owners refuse permission to cut, the gangs take all the rattan
by force, disregarding both the usual harvest share arrangements
and the tradition of cutting only ten per cent of each rattan clump
62 Nancy Lee Peluso
(J.H.Mayer, pers. comm., 1989; cf. Peluso, 1983b).

The carpet manufacturing revolution in South Kalimantan has
also had a tremendous impact on patterns of labour allocation in the
two adjacent provinces, providing new opportunities for off-farm
employment ranging from wage labour near the processing factories
to truck-driving and trade between the provinces. These new
activities have increased the integration of recent migrants into
Kalimantan, and increased East Kalimantan’s integration with the
world economy. The opportunities are also a new way for swidden
agriculturalists to fill the income gaps during slow seasons in agri-
cultural production or hungry periods before the rice harvest. This
gap was traditionally filled by expeditions into the forest to collect
produce for sale or subsistence; it was also a time for gathering the
rattan to be used in home production of rattan carpets. As early as
1980, however, swiddening households in Pasir were unwilling to
invest time in the home production of rattan carpets for sale, finding
it much easier to collect rattan, split it and sell it in bundles to the
droves of traders seeking it from South Kalimantan. Access to East
Kalimantan rattan has been facilitated by the new all-weather paved
road from Balikpapan to Banjarmasin - a journey which used to
take three days under the best dry season conditions can now be
made in about eight hours.
Factory-scale capitalist production of rattan carpeting, though
labour intensive, is changing patterns of household production:
whereas these households’ petty commodity production used to
include forest collection, trade and the home production of carpets
and mats, the home manufacture component has been eliminated to
be replaced, for some, by wage labour in rattan industries. This is
not the only such change in the range of rural economic activities,
but it does indicate the beginning of the semi-proletarianization of
some forest-dwelling people of East Kalimantan as the mode of pro-
duction for rattan goods changes.
The conjuncture of these political-economic events has reverbe-
rated down to the village level, by increasing the employment of
indigenous and migrant labour in activities related to rattan extrac-
tion. These events have also led to the current government efforts
to encourage rattan cultivation by smallholders as well as by large
entrepreneurs.
CONJUNCTURES AND CHANGES 11: THE 1980s
Events in the 1980s have also changed both the resource base and
patterns of labour allocation in extractive activities, although there
has as yet been little field research exploring the most recent trends
in detail, apart from a recent, unpublished report by Mayer (1989)
and some work by a team of Japanese and Indonesian researchers
(Inoue et al., 1988).' The main events of the 1980s were environ-
mental, and generally took the form of disaster: the East Kaliman-
tan-Sabah forest fires and the drought of 1982-3 destroyed or
severely damaged 3.6 million hectares of East Kalimantan forest
(Mayer, 1989: 1.1).
These related disasters destroyed, permanently or temporarily,
many prime sources of rattan and significantly affected the house-
hold production strategies of forest villagers. Since rattan was both
a subsistence and a commercial product, a source of cash, the lost
stocks put a double pressure on households: for alternative cash
sources per se, but also for increased cash to buy subsistence goods
that could substitute for rattan. Forest collection activities remained
drastically reduced as much as six years after the fire, especially
those which were not for direct subsistence. People travelled to
villages beyond the range of the fire to seek temporary access to
food and other subsistence products but these temporary rights to
other villagers' forests were not generally extended for commercial
uses (Mayer, 1989).
Once the resource base has recovered (some species of rattan can
be first cut seven to ten years after planting), more people are likely
to return to rattan collection and trade. For example, Mayer found
that in some areas, products destroyed in the fire began to reappear
in the forests near some villages within three to four years (1989:
3.13).
Legislative changes enacted or implemented in the 1980s also had
major impacts on participation in commercial collection and trade
in areas not directly affected by the fires. A government regulation
on rattan trade (No. 492/KP/VII/79) prohibited the export of raw
rattan, beginning effectively in the final months of 1979, although
it had been passed in 1974. This was followed in July 1988 by a ban
on exports of semi-processed rattan (Keputusan Mentri Per-
dagangan No. 190/KP/VI/88). Both laws, but particularly the most
recent, were meant to increase value-added tax from rattan and to
stimulate both rattan-based industries and commercial (plantation)
64 Nancy Lee Peluso
production of rattan. Indeed, by July 1989, rattan manufacturing

capacities had increased more than 600 per cent since the passing of
the law, and the number of rattan manufacturing enterprises had
increased by more than 250 per cent (Menon, 1989). Unfortunately,
most of these manufacturing enterprises are not providing new
opportunities for the people of East Kalimantan, for they are
located either in South Kalimantan, as mentioned earlier, or in
the part of Indonesia where labour is most abundant and least
expensive - Java. The ratio of daily wages paid in East Kalimantan
to those in Java has remained about 3:l since the 1970s, and labour
costs are the reason cited by manufacturers and investors for the
development of rattan industries far from the main sources of
rattan.
Additional government controls on rattan production have
been instituted through the issuance of collection licences (Hak
Pemungutan Hasil Hutan: HPHH) to individuals or corporate
entities. A study in 1988 found that the holders of the HPHH tended
to be river traders or other (undefined) ‘higher level traders’, while
village traders act ‘astheir agents who make arrangements regarding
price and required volume’ (ADB, 1988: A1-28). Licences state the
name of the permittee, the location of collection, and the species and
amount that may be collected. Though field research is needed to
explore the specific impacts of this control, some of the anticipated
difficulties were discussed in a paper written after the government
had announced its intentions to NTFP exporters and relevant
regional government officials at a conference in July 1980 (Peluso,
1983b). Ministry of Forestry officials recently cited the establish-
ment of rattan plantations - some privately funded and operated,
others funded by an Asian Development Bank (ADB) loan to the
Ministry (to be implemented by the government forestry corpora-
tion, INHUTANI) - as a positive outcome of this new regulation.
Whether these corporate plantations will take account of individual,
family and village-level rights of forest access is unclear, although
past experience in the forest products sector makes it seem unlikely.
Just last year a provincial Kalimantan forester admitted that the
licence system had been plagued with problems, not only because of
manipulation by traders and outside opportunists, but also because
many villages were not organized to apply for permits. Nor had the
villages received much help from the forestry officials.
Finally, both forestry and non-forestry based changes in the
structure of East Kalimantan’s economy have affected rattan
supplies and participation in collection and trade. Contract labour

is still being brought to East Kalimantan plantations and logging
operations from Java and other islands. As already discussed, large-
scale forest conversion projects clearly have an impact on the
availability of rattan. With a few exceptions, plantations may pro-
duce either agriculture or timber tree crops but do not allow for rat-
tan regeneration. In addition, the labourers brought in to work on
the plantations increase not only the total population of the pro-
vince but also the numbers who collect rattan to supplement
household income. The expansion of the Transmigration Pro-
gramme, in which families from the more populated islands of Java,
Bali and Lombok are resettled in Kalimantan and other less
populated islands, has stopped temporarily, while existing sites are
being ‘improved’. Transmigrants’ difficulties in supporting
themselves in private agriculture, nucleus-estate agriculture or other
employment schemes has caused some to turn to swidden cultivation
and rattan gathering.
In sum, the extraction of wild and cultivated rattan is expanding
for reasons stemming from market demand, structures of access,
government policies and priorities and natural disaster. The undo-
ing of traditional authority over access has been effected in layers
of political-economic change, the impacts of which have accumu-
lated over the decades. By 1989, East Kalimantan rattan provided
a classic case of widespread and virtually uncontrollable forest
extraction. Moreover, while the transition to capitalist relations of
production in extraction and processing of rattan has benefited col-
lectors in some ways, it has simultaneously deprived them of rights
and the means of enforcing their rights to NTFPs, thus exposing the
sources of rattan to very real threats of depletion. Considering the
extensive destruction of rattan habitats (by fire, logging, conversion
to plantations and migrant populations) and the overwhelming
increase in rattan extraction, it seems clear that the current rate of
extraction is anything but sustainable.
EXTRACTIVE RESERVES
Where do extractive reserves fit into this political-economic pic-

ture? Extractive reserves in the Amazon have been defined as ‘forest
areas inhabited by extractive populations granted long-term
usufruct rights to forest resources which they collectively manage’
66 Nancy Lee Peluso
(Schwartzman, 1989: 151). The notion of a forest management

system based on control over and access to the forest resources
within particular land areas rather than the forest land itself is not
new: Indians throughout the Americas and the peoples of Southeast
Asia and Africa traditionally concerned themselves with the pro-
ducts of the land (Cronon, 1983; Bunker, 1985; Raintree, 1987;
Hecht et al., 1988; Peluso, 1992a, b).
Extractive reserves which follow the most basic tenets of the
Amazonian model will have their own unique constraints in the East
Kalimantan setting. The political ecology of rattan described above
gives us a starting-point for posing questions salient to the creation
and structuring of extractive reserves in East Kalimantan. The first
question is whether or not sufficient land is available to set aside for
extractive reserves. Many different large-scale interests have been
granted temporary or permanent access to East Kalimantan’s forest
lands: loggers, plantations, resettlement. These powerful interests
are well entrenched in Indonesia’s current conception of appropriate
forest use for the long term. In addition, the forest service has been
completing forest land use maps indicating how tracts of forest are
to be designated (as production, protection or conversion forests).
Though acknowledged informally by current planners and formally
by the Indonesian constitution, village forests managed under
customary law are not recognized on these maps. These lands hold
the greatest potential for targeting as extractive reserves. Customary
forests between villages are generally neither contiguous nor suffi-
ciently extensive to mark on large-scale land use maps.
A second key question for East Kalimantan, and perhaps for all
of Indonesia, is which groups should be made custodians of the
reserves. Should only the autochthonous forest-dependent peoples
of Kalimantan - Punan hunter gatherers and the various groups of
Dayak swidden cultivators - be given forest reserve rights, or are
the upriver Kutais and Banjars who have lived in East Kalimantan
forests for centuries also to be accorded reserves? Will access rights
be reserved for Bugis, Chinese and Javanese who have moved to
East Kalimantan within the past one hundred years? Are the lines
to be drawn by ethnicity alone or in terms of length of residence or
commitment to a particular area? In the latter instance, would those
tribal people who have migrated downstream, far from their
‘homelands’ (such as the Apo Kayan), be excluded from access to
upriver forest reserves or allowed to create new ones in the vicinity
of their new homes? Rights of forest access, the use of forest
products and village forest management strategies have been little

studied among the non-tribal groups of Kalimantan. Many non-
tribal people, such as the Kutai, have lived there for hundreds of
years, and arguably have claims t o the forest areas they have
managed over the centuries. Further study of the forest access
regulations for these groups would be necessary before partitioning
parts of the forest into reserves.
A third question concerns the motives underlying the creation of
extractive reserves, i.e. once an area is set aside for an extractive
reserve, who will make the decisions and the choices? This question
is important because it relates to the empowerment aspect of the
political ecology of extraction. Power to decide and autonomy in
decision-making have implications for the first generation of extrac-
tors as well as for their descendants. Autonomy relates t o the
capacity to make resource management decisions, to negotiate with
the state and to act independently of interested outside groups.
Ultimately, political autonomy, if that is possible, will affect the
way in which environmental sustainability is defined - a matter of
great concern to many of the environmentalists promoting extrac-
tion. The question of autonomy also concerns the extent to which
such reserves will constrain o r protect the lifestyles and aspirations
of the people for whom benefits are targeted, and to what extent
they will exclude other traditional forest users.
In the Amazon, rights within the extractive reserves are vested in
rubber tappers, including some indigenous Indians and many more
descendants of relatively recent migrants (100-200 years) who tap-
ped natural rubber within the forest. These rubber tappers are
organized essentially as a labour organization with collective rights
in the forest. However, the political climate in Indonesia, unlike the
Amazon, is not at all conducive to the unionization of rattan collec-
tors. The state associates all non-government unions with com-
munism, which is outlawed by the Indonesian state. Even the
formation of ‘co-operatives’ (KUD or koperasi unit desa) requires
the state’s direct involvement in the organization’s management.
This brings up the critical question of replacing the middlemen:
could state-controlled co-operatives be less costly and more efficient
than the middlemen? The experience with government co-operatives
in Indonesia has not been good (see Peluso, 1983b).
These are all good reasons for suggesting that extractive reserves
should be organized around villages. For most forest-dwelling
people of East Kalimantan, the collection of rattan and other forest
68 Nancy Lee Peluso
products is a part-time activity, practised in conjunction with swid-

den agriculture, swidden fallowing, tree gardening and other sub-
sistence and economic activities. Just as the market demands a
variety of products at different times, NTFPs are subject to diverse
access constraints and controls, depending on the products’ natural
characteristics and local or interacting modes of access and control.
Rattan collection and trade are not the exclusive domain of certain
ethnic groups, nor is there a stigma attached to collection or trade
activities. In general, membership in NTFP collection groups is not
constant. Collection groups are usually formed on an ad hoc basis;
they may travel to distant or close forest sites for collection. In some
areas, collection rights to some resources derive from the time of
first use or discovery of the site: newcomers are supposed to respect
the claims of the finders. If rights were to be formally allocated,
the formation of extractive reserves would require the definition
of specific user groups. Yet, to fit the lifestyles and time con-
straints of indigenous people involved in extraction, membership
guidelines would have to allow for contraction and expansion of the
groups.
The critical characteristics for a new type of formal forest rights
are flexibility and diversity. Despite the permanency implied in the
establishment of extractive reserves, it remains true that traditional
property arrangements are not stagnant and immutable, and that
changes in local circumstances can shift them in unexpected ways
(Padoch, 1982). Moreover, de facto resource management among
users may differ considerably both from that group’s ideology of
management and from any formal rules imposed on the resource’s
use by external agencies such as regional or national governments.
It is exactly this flexibility and diversity of local management
strategies, however, that has contributed to the availability of
myriad resources in the rainforests of Borneo today.
At present there is a new state control on rattan extraction, a
permit resembling a logging concession called Huk Pemungutan
Husil Hutan Rofan (HPHHR) or ‘Licence to Harvest Rattan Forest
Products’ (Minister of Forestry Decree No. 208/Kpts-I1/1989 of
May 5 , 1989). Rattan harvesters are defined as ‘those who live in
the vicinity of the forest who have been given permission by the
authorities to harvest wild rattan’. The provincial governor or the
chief of the provincial forest service has the authority to issue
these non-transferrable licences to individuals, groups or (govern-
ment) co-operatives. Again, licences specify the holder’s name, the
collection area, and the volume and species to be harvested within a

maximum of six months. Collection areas may be located within
various types of production or conversion forest, for which ‘Rattan
Plantation Licences’ have not been granted; they may not be located
in Nature Reserves (Hutan Suaka Alarn), Recreation Forest (Hutan
Wisata), or National Parks (Taman Nasional).
Although this legislative opportunity has been only minimally
tapped, it does provide a window for establishing villages’ rights
to exclude others from collecting rattan in their forest territories.
Such exclusive rights are particularly important to villages whose
traditional territories are being invaded by newcomers. Further-
more, securing the boundaries of traditional village resource ter-
ritories by government permit would not preclude the application of
traditional tenure rules within these boundaries. Such an arrange-
ment would thus allow flexibility in local regulation of access
and would not impede the dynamics of local social change. It is
critical, however, that such an alternative be suggested before
outside commercial interests establish de jure rights to forest
territories. Moreover, government backing of the recognition of
favoured village rights would be imperative in enforcing rights of
exclusion.
Another piece of state legislation affecting the rattan trade is
called Hak Pengusahaan Hutan Tanaman Rotan (HPHTR) or
‘Forest Enterprise Licence for Rattan Plantations’. Licensees
may be government enterprises (parastatals), private enterprises,
co-operatives, farmers’ groups or individuals; they are granted
rights to plant, maintain and benefit from plantation rattan in areas
ranging from 2500 ha to 10,OOO ha. Individuals and co-operatives
may apply to establish plantations in areas of less than 2500 hec-
tares. All licences are issued initially for twenty years. Besides the
usual obligations to maintain the integrity of the resource, rattan
plantation licensees are also required to establish, or to co-operate
with, rattan processing industries.
At a rattan seminar at the Ministry of Forestry in August 1988,
the Director General of Forest Utilization publicly supported
the roles of farmers, farm groups, co-operatives and small
companies in the raw material supply and primary processing of
rattan. His comments are especially encouraging for those of us
interested in seeing more of the benefits from forest product produc-
tion go to the people of East Kalimantan and other forest areas of
Indonesia:
10 Nancy Lee Peluso
Incentives for the people to develop their rattan farms and engage in primary pro-
cessing shall be provided. The right to gather/harvest rattan in the natural forest
shall be given to the people, farmer groups, and cooperatives in the locality. . . .
Medium-sized and large companies will help the government in developing the
rattan processing/rnanufacturing industry and support the people’s efforts in
rattan production and primary processing. . . . The natural forest shall be
managed more intensively for the production not only of timber but also of
rattan. (cited in Menon, 1989: 12)
What this indicates is that a legal framework for the establishment

of village reserves and rattan production enterprises on state forest
lands is already in place. However, a caveat is in order: the industrial
and large-scale orientation implied by the government’s strategy,
modelled on the nation’s timber concessions, may be discussed as a
complement t o small-scale resource production, but it has the
potential to usurp forest producers’ territorial and other tenurial
rights. Local people need to organize t o take advantage of this new
legislation on their own terms, empowering themselves to compete
with larger, more experienced, highly capitalized commercial enter-
prises. Given the pattern established by timber companies and plan-
tation projects in Kalimantan, where contract labour from outside
is preferred t o local labour, this new legislation could deprive
indigenous people of both a critical economic and subsistence rain-
forest product and of their rights of forest access.
CONCLUSION
Kalimantan, with its long history of forest extraction for subsis-

tence and trade is a ‘natural’ setting in which to implement a con-
servation and development strategy such as extractive reserves.
However, as this political ecology analysis has shown, the specifics
of the East Kalimantan case stress the need to adapt the structure
of extractive reserves. The changing power relations between collec-
tors and traders as cash becomes more important in local trade,
the political-economic changes affecting Indonesia as a nation and
East Kalimantan province specifically and the opportunities these
changes have engendered for increasing the rate and amount of
rattan extracted, all affect the current sources of rattan and their
local management. They will also inevitably affect the possibilities
for structuring extractive reserves.
Given the current trend of opening the interior of Kalimantan to
more types of entrepreneurs and pioneers, and the history of state

and commercial encroachment on the forests and the forest-dwellers
of Kalimantan, local people acting alone are likely to have dif-
ficulties recapturing either de facto or de jure control of the forests
surrounding their villages. The production and export orientation of
the Indonesian state could potentially make the commercial orienta-
tion of extractive reserves an attractive alternative to full-scale
forest conversion. Timber products and other conversion uses of the
forests of Kalimantan are so important to the Indonesian state’s
development strategy that setting aside forest for local people will
require the creation of formal legal authority for villages. One way
of doing this is the creation of extractive reserves. Extractive
reserves will not salvage or prevent the appropriation of local peo-
ple’s rights to non-timber products in all forest concessions, but that
is another issue (see Peluso, 1992~).The question here is how to
create extractive reserves for some parts of East Kalimantan in order
to take advantage of the rhetoric of Indonesian policy and law but
avoid the pitfalls of benefit-capture by outsiders.
NOTES
Earlier drafts of this article benefited from the comments of Christine Padoch, Dan
Nepstad and Bruce Koppel. I am responsible for its remaining shortcomings.
1. The longue dur& of the East Kalimantan trade in non-timber forest products
has been detailed elsewhere (see Peluso, 1983a. 1983b, 1992b; Jessup, 1989; Hall,
1985; Warren, 1975).
2 . See Wolf (1982) for a discussion of the need to analyse history in terms of
conjunctures.
3. Monopsony occurs when one individual controls the buyers’ market for com-
modities; when one person or firm controls the sellers’ market, it is monopoly.
4. For example, 2, 3 or 4-metre long uncut stems stripped of their spiny skins
and silica layers are sold by the kilo, while strips that are 1,2 or 3 metres long which
have been stripped and split into 6 strips are bundled in bunches of 100, called
tampik.
5 . The term ‘rattan carpet’ refers to mats which are made of split and cored canes
tied together at either end, but which are essentially unwoven pieces. Mats are made
of cored canes which are split into finer pieces and interwoven to make a flatter piece.
6. Other kinds of rattan processing plants are those which wash and sulphurize
(W & S)raw rattan, or which split or core and skin rattan to provide materials to the
large manufacturers of processed rattan goods for export (Peluso, 1986).
7. At the time of going to press, the glut of rattan carpet industries and the fluc-
tuating Japanese demand have led to a decline in the profits from this industry (Leslie
Potter, pers. comm., March 1992).
72 Nancy Lee Peluso
8. Stephanie Fried has just begun research on rattan production systems in the
Damai region of East Kalimantan which should provide important data on the
minimally understood processes of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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Nancy Lee Peluso is assistant professor of

natural resource policy at the Yale School of
Forestry and Environmental Studies, New
Haven, CT 065 1 1, USA. Her publications
include Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource
Control and Resistance in Java (University of
California Press, 1992), as well as numerous
articles on Indonesian forestry and development
issues. She is currently conducting research on
political ecology and resource rights in West
Kalimantan, Indonesia, and is co-editing a book
with Christine Padoch, Borneo in Transition:
People, Forests, Conservation and Development.

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The Political Ecology of Extraction and

Nancy Lee Peluso

Extractive reserves established in the Amazon have given development profes-

The extraction of non-timber products from tropical forests has

translation of the original Spanish extructivos) are local rainforest

THE POLITICS OF ACCESS TO FOREST PRODUCTS:

Commercial and subsistence forest extraction make substantial con-

‘Dayaks’, to various people descended from the ‘coastal Malay’

Indonesia neither understand nor heed the traditions of indigenous

MANAGEMENT OF RATTAN: PRODUCTION, PROTECTION

Rattan is managed in various ways throughout the province. Rattan

Rattan collection is generally a part-time activity, engaged in by

THE LOCAL POLITICS OF RATLAN COLLECTION AND

Traditionally, village people traded local rattans to riverboat or

CONJUNCTURES AND CHANGES AFFECTING

The collection and trading of rattan have become progressively

rattan goods: each of these is addressed below.

were able to pull out or switch to trading in non-timber forest pro-

Table 1. Exports of Rattan from Indonesia, 1971-87

Year Raw and semi-processed Matting and basketry Furniture Total

1971 32,150 32,150

Source: Central Bureau of Statistics, cited in de Beer and McDermott (1989).

1980s. This was the increase of foreign investment, particularly by

(J.H.Mayer, pers. comm., 1989; cf. Peluso, 1983b).

CONJUNCTURES AND CHANGES 11: THE 1980s

production of rattan. Indeed, by July 1989, rattan manufacturing

supplies and participation in collection and trade. Contract labour

Where do extractive reserves fit into this political-economic pic-

(Schwartzman, 1989: 151). The notion of a forest management

products and village forest management strategies have been little

products is a part-time activity, practised in conjunction with swid-

collection area, and the volume and species to be harvested within a

What this indicates is that a legal framework for the establishment

Kalimantan, with its long history of forest extraction for subsis-

more types of entrepreneurs and pioneers, and the history of state

Asian Development Bank (1988) ‘Rattan Development Project in Indonesia. Volume

Nancy Lee Peluso is assistant professor of

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