BURU ISLAND, Indonesia – At the beginning of November last year, Tamami’s rice field lay vacant except for a herd of cattle grazing on the land. Like many rice farmers here on Buru Island in Indonesia’s eastern Maluku region, 53-year-old Tamami set aside his field after the availability of water dried up. “There’s no rain,” Tamami told Mongabay Indonesia in Savana Jaya village. “The reservoir is empty because of the long dry season.” In a normal year, rice farmers begin planting the third and final rice crop of the year in October and November. But the emergence of the El Niño climate pattern made 2023 the hottest year on record, and extended Indonesia’s main dry season beyond October. Sutiah, a farmer from Waitele village, said planting on her 4 hectares (10 acres) of rice fields had failed owing to the extreme weather and water scarcity. The write-off will cost her family tens of millions of rupiah, she said. “What’s going on with this weather?” she asked. Indonesia’s meteorology agency, the BMKG, documented extremely low levels of rainfall in much of eastern Indonesia during the second half of 2023, including on the island where Sutiah and Tamami grow rice. From August to October, monthly rainfall in the Maluku region was consistently recorded in the low range of 0-100 millimeters (0-4 inches). Yeli Sarvina, a climate researcher at Indonesia’s national research agency, BRIN, said drought had decimated rice harvests across Buru Island. A farmer in Waeapo, Buru, leveling the grain from the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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