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| Fruit Trees and Family Trees: Property Rights and Environmental Change in an Indonesian Rainforest - A case from village of Bagak in Setipa Mountain Region |
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Reference |
| Peluso, Nancy Lee: " Fruit Trees and Family Trees: Property Rights and Environmental Change in an Indonesian Rainforest.", paper prepared for the Agrarian Studies Seminar, Yale University, 1994. |
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Introduction to the Institution |
| The village of Bagak is located on the slopes of the Setipa Mountain. It has more than a hundred single-family houses. Major crops are rice and fruit. Durian trees are considered to be the most economically and ecologically important fruit tree. They occupy 71 % of the old and medium aged fruit forests basal area. They are productive for up to 150 years and their ownership spans for many generations, changing over time from private property of the person who planted the tree to shared property of the ever increasing group of planters descendants. Durian drops from the tree when it reaches its peak flavor. It must be eaten processed or sold rapidly because it will loose its flavor, quality and value fast. The fruit of a tree will drop within 7 to 21 days, and the entire Durian season will last for about 2 months or more. |
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Coverage of the Institution |
| Other texts indicates that similar rules are found elsewhere on Kalimantan ,( See G.N. Appell.). The institution is concurrent. |
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Rules for Management
of the Institution |
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(a) Boundary Rules |
| SOCIAL BOUNDARIES: Access to fruittrees is given to descendants of the planter. The text indicates, that a descendant will loose his use rights if he or she moves to another village.
SPATIAL BOUNDARIES: The village of Bagak and surrounding forest. |
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(b) Governance
rules |
| Not reported. |
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(c) Resource Allocation |
| Initially a durian tree will belong to the person who planted it. When the planter pass away, primary rights will be given to his or her spouse. After the spouse pass away, all male and female children inherit rights to the tree, but primary right is given to the child who remained in the household of the parents until their death. He or she will make the final decision of who will have access to the tree. Often children will agree to share the fruits equally, but at some occassions, the rights of some of the children have been eliminated, either by sibling discord or because they have moved away to other villages. When all the children of the planter have passed away, all the grandchildren will have equal rights. Durian has been held in common by descendants for as long as seven generations.
Harvest rules: Due to the physiological characteristics of durian (see Int.), specific harvesting rules are used. First of all, it is required that the rightholder or a representative of the rightholder is present when the fruit is harvested, that is, when the fruit falls from the tree. Often a temporary shelter will be built at the tree to make sure that no fruits are wasted. If none is guarding a durian tree, all people are allowed to eat the fruit that happens to fall down when they pass the tree.
Leasing: As harvesting of rice and durian takes place during the same period, harvest rights of durian trees are sometimes leased out. This enables people to get a higher outcome of their crop, as time prevents them from conducting both harvests efficiently. For leasing out a tree, the tree must have been planted by the leasor or the leasors spouse, allocated to the leasor as the child of the planter or given to the leasor through distribution of panene'ans (See Oth.) to individuals. When leasing, the lessee gains full right to all the fruits produced within a certain period of time. Several systems of leasing (pajak) exists, but here we will limit ourselves to the description of three general types: In a seasonal lease, the tree is leased out for one season. Contracts will be made during the flowering season or just when the early fruit has arrived. This enables the parts to estimate the outcome of the season; In a yearly lease, the tree is contracted for a number of consecutive years and; In a shelter lease, the lessee will contract for three to five good years - the years where it is worthwhile to built a shelter. If the lessee decides that the year will be bad, he can return it to the tree holder for the season. |
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Conflict Resolution Mechanism |
| Privatization of Durian trees seems to induce some conflict. Some villagers regard it as unetchical (See Chan.). |
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Problems Faced by Institution |
| Government land zoning policies (See Chan.) |
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Changes in the Institution over time |
| Government land zoning policies since the 1930'es and qualitative and quantitative changes in market access, has lead to changes in the general forest management practices used by the village. Resistance emerged as the Dutch colonial government carved a nature reserve from some of the ancestral lands of the Bagyak's. For the last two generations, the boundaries of these reserves have been blurred by the villagers by planting economic trees on either sides. But more important, they have changed the resource management of the land still under their jurisdiction. The hillsides, which earlier contained a mixture of swidden fields, fallows and managed forests, are now dominated by a variety of economic trees such as rubber, fruit, self sown timber and medicinal species.
Changes in market acces has lead to privatization of panene'ans (Durian trees planted by anscestors - see Oth.) at a limited scale. This is becoming the focus of an internal contestation on the meaning of the local forest resources. The privatizations can take place in different ways:
- The descendent group can decide to distribute commonly held trees among the individual members.
- Grandparents might assign specific trees or clusters of trees to individual grandchildren.
- Individuals usurp the ownership groups authority and assume ownership of panene'ans, usually by planting young trees around the old tree or simply by building a shelter by the tree year after year without consulting the group. This can not take place without the knowledge of the group, and thus it must be with their spoken or unspoken consent, since they still have right claims to the tree. Often this failure to exert common rights is regarded as a way to avoid public discord.
- Finally, privatization can take place when a group member leases a tree to someone outside the group for a season or longer. Because disputes has arised on these kinds of settlement, written agreements are now being made, to be held by the village headman.
Still, it should be emphasized that privatization is not a universal trend. Many families think that it is wrong to privatize panene'ans - some people interveiewed by the researchers did not even believe that it could occur. |
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Other Features of Institution |
| Trees planted by grandparents or more remote anscestors are called panene'ans. Typically all members of a community will have access to a number of panene'ans. i.e. a married couple would have access to four panene'ans planted by grandparents and many more planted by more remote anscestors (If they are from the same village). Thus, theoretically one could survive by depending on panene'ans. In reality though, this is not socially accepted, and preferably one should plant and grow trees at a young age in order to become independent of panene'ans and leave behind a heritage for future generations. |
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Purpose |
| Distributing ownership of fruit trees and formulating rules for harvest of these. |
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Country |
| Indonesia |
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Region |
| Setipa Mountain, West Kalimantan. |
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Date Of Publication |
| TroB 250396 |
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