A Nusa Penida seaweed farmer repairs the net that secures her plants when the tide ebbs. In the background is Mt. Agung, the island’s holiest mountain. BD/Agung Parameswara
Not only dealing with nature’s tidal ebb and flow, the tough seaweed farmers of Nusa Penida Island, southeast of Bali, have been putting up with the unpredictable price of their harvests for decades.
A resident of the coastline of Nusa Penida, 73-year-old Wayan Repung, has been harvesting seaweed for the past 30 years, and, until today, he continues doing so alongside his wife, Ketut Kanthi.
“Our age should have forced us to stop working, yet the situation has made us do otherwise,” bare-chested grandpa Repung smiled radiantly despite the hardships showing off his toothless gums, as he dried his seaweed harvest under the scorching heat of the sun one afternoon near his home in Suana village.
As their earnings are simply enough for one day’s meals, 60-year-old Kanthi added, “How can we stop working if our stomachs are empty?” The couple could only ensure that their two now-adult children completed junior high school as higher education was just too expensive to pay for from the seaweed harvests alone.
Just like the couple, dadong (grandma) Ni Nengah Lagri, a resident of banjar Bodong in Ped village, who is fondly called the Iron Grannie by her neighbors, keeps returning to the sea as the tide recedes during harvest time. “I’ve just harvested this morning at 4 a.m.,” said the hunch-backed grannie, who has no idea of her actual age.
Over the past decades, the dozens of kilometers of seaweed farms — beginning at Toya Pakeh village and ending at Suana village along the western to eastern coastline of the secluded Nusa Penida — have served as the backbone revenue generator for the villagers, yet to some extent, it is failing to improve their basic quality of life.
“Seaweed prices have always changed drastically. Although seaweed farming is the main economic activity on this island, we can never count on it alone,” said Nyoman Sukarta, a seaweed farmer for eight years, who sent two of his four children through university. He could only achieve this because he also earns an income from his cattle and a 16-hectare coconut tree farm.
Spinosum (eucheuma spinosum) and katoni (eucheuma cottonii) are the two most sought after seaweed types on the island.
In a banjar (local neighborhood organization) owned by farmer Nyoman Carti, spinosum fetches Rp 4,200 per kilogram, while katoni brings in Rp 7,000 per kg. “Last year, katoni went up to Rp 12,000 per kg,” said Carti.
All the farmers pointed out that their hardships were due to the fact that they have no say in determining the selling price, as all prices are controlled by the collectors and tengkulak (middlemen), who are often also loan sharks. When facing cash shortages, farmers borrow money from the tengkulak because the island’s only Village Cooperative Unit (KUD) does not function, thus the entangled situation weakens the farmers’ bargaining position.
Nusa Penida’s seaweed farming was initiated in 1984 by the Jungutbatu villagers of the neighboring Nusa Lembongan Island after seeds were distributed there by some seaweed businesspeople from Surabaya, recalled Made Alep, the largest seaweed collector in Nusa Penida who owns a 300-ton capacity warehouse in banjar Batumulapan in Suana village.
“After the first harvests in Lembongan were purchased by the businessmen, the news of how seaweed could provide quick cash spread fast among villagers here. Within that same year, the entire Nusa Penida coastline, from east to west, turned into seaweed farms,” added Wayan Nurada, Alep’s husband. Prior to the emergence of seaweed farming, villagers of the arid Nusa Penida mostly earned irregular incomes from selling cattle and farming corn, cassava and other harvests that depend heavily on the rainy season.
Most of the seaweed harvests of Nusa Penida and Nusa Lembongan are purchased by the husband-and-wife team of Alep and Nurada, who have dominated the seaweed trading business since 1984. They sell hundreds of tons of seaweed on a monthly basis to traders in Surabaya and Jakarta that export the processed harvests to China, Japan, France and the United States. Spinosum seaweed is an ingredient used in cooking in China, while katoni is processed into seaweed flour for various industries, including cosmetics, medicine and food.
Alep acknowledged that competition is tightening nowadays due to a rise in other local collectors who trade with businesses in Jakarta and Surabaya after the opening of the ferry port in Mentigi-Kutampi.
Nurada blamed the uncertain
demand from Surabaya and Jakarta, as well as the low quality of harvests, as the main cause of the
fluctuating prices. “We pay a high price only if the harvests have been dried correctly, resulting in the ideal 24 percent water content. We have received harvests that are insufficiently dried and sometimes even mixed with trash,” said Nurada. Buying wet harvests would be expensive, because after his workers dried the seaweed the remaining volume would shrink up to 45 percent.
Despite having applied the correct harvest-drying procedure to reach the expected export quality, farmers said they still had to put up with drastic price fluctuations. “Five years ago, we dried the harvests correctly, but the prices remained unsteady. So now, farmers just sell the harvests whenever the price is seen to be suitable,” said Sukarta.
“The trade politics of seaweed here is fierce. We need the presence of stronger investors to compete against this couple that have been monopolizing the trade here,” said another Nusa Penida resident Wayan Suryanta, who quit farming seaweed to work for the island’s Bali Starling bird sanctuary.
Nowadays, many of the seaweed farmers are the elderly, while younger residents prefer to search for work in the city of Denpasar or transmigrate to Sumbawa or Sumatra.
Hi, is there a date on this article? Thanks. Very interesting.
ReplyDelete