Restoring Indonesia’s peatlands to their natural soggy glory
A picket fence encloses a single sago palm in Sungai Tohor, a village of 1,300 on the coast of Sumatra. A billboard to the right gives title to the bushy tree: the Jokowi Sago Monument. Jokowi is the nickname of Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo. The tree was planted in his honor when he visited in 2014.
Abdul Manan, the farmer and entrepreneur who drives me to the sago shrine on the back of his beat-up motorcycle, says it’s no surprise that villagers are proud of this palm. Sago is the most important crop in this part of Indonesia.
“This is like villagers’ savings,” he says, “to pay for the children to go to school, to middle school, to university.”
Mr. Manan himself owns a 12-acre stand of sago and a mill for grinding up its pulp, an edible starch. He produces packets of coconut-flavored balls of roasted sago and bags of sago pasta.
Just before President Widodo’s visit, wildfires had swept through Sungai Tohor and other parts of the province of Riau. Fires have devastated Borneo – an island that Indonesia shares with Malaysia and Brunei – and Sumatra for decades. The incessant blazes reduce oil palm and acacia plantations to ashes and incinerate dwindling patches of natural forest, home toair pollution.
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