Struggling to deal with the impacts of climate change (IrinNews)

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INDONESIA: Farmers lament the impact of La Niña

TEGALEGA, 15 November 2010 (IRIN) – Indonesian farmers, who account for 57 percent of the country’s poor, are increasingly struggling to deal with the impacts of climate change, as the longer rainy season leads to poorer yields and a shorter harvest.

“Normally one hectare would produce 6MT, now it produces only 2.5MT,” says Ujang Majudin of his rice crop.

Majudin heads a farmers’ cooperative on the island of Java with more than 300 members. But with such bad weather this year, it is struggling.

“Almost all the crops are destroyed, so production is very low and the price I have to pay for the vegetables is very high,” Majudin says, pointing at the piles of rotting vegetables in his storage shed.

Indonesia normally has a six-month wet season (November to March) and a six-month dry season (June to October), but this year it simply kept on raining. The UN World Meteorological Organization blames the weather phenomena La Niña, saying the rains will continue for the next four to six months. As well as vegetable and rice farmers, producers of palm oil, tin, cocoa, coal and rubber also complain about the heavy tropical storms.

The consequences are already being felt at local markets where crop prices have jumped 20 percent.

Farmer Muhamad Subadri has a small plot of land in the fertile hills of Tegalega, a four-hour drive from the capital Jakarta. With nine mouths to feed he is very worried about the enormous rainfall. “The pesticides I use on my crops have been washed away, so caterpillars eat my crops. And for the rice it is a problem because we can’t dry it, so it rots.”

Rice dependency

In other areas paddy fields are flooded, making it impossible to even harvest the rice, a staple food which Indonesians eat more than any other people on Earth: 136kg per person per year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

For the first time in three years the Indonesian government announced last month it would import rice, even though it aims to be self-sufficient.

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