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Desperation sets in for Indigenous Sumatrans who lost their forests to plantations

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SEPINTUN, Indonesia — Past generations of Dahwas’s family lived off the food and fuel growing all around them, traversing Sumatra’s forest unobstructed whenever cultural norms required the seminomadic Suku Anak Dalam people to seek out a fresh location. Dahwas has lived with his seven children inside the forest here in Indonesia’s Jambi province his entire life, but in recent decades the land available to the Suku Anak Dalam has been shrinking. “We have been living here for 13 years,” Dahwas told Mongabay Indonesia, as he pointed to nearby fruit trees and the family cemetery. Around half of the Suku Anak Dalam, perhaps as many as 2,500 people, have lost their customary territory to plantation firms, according to KKI Warsi, a Sumatra-based NGO that advocates for the community. Among the companies is PT Alam Lestari Nusantara (ALN), an Indonesian state-owned firm that manages rubber plantations. It has a permit to manage 10,785 hectares (26,650 aces) of land here in Sepintun village, and sells the latex to a local processor owned by Thailand-based Sri Trang Group, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of natural rubber. In 2016, according to Dahwas, an ALN representative visited his family and asked them to relinquish their claim to the land. Someone claiming to own the land had already sold it, all 70 hectares (173 acres), to the company without Dahwas’s knowledge. Now, the ALN representative was asking him to vacate it and, in a goodwill gesture, offering to build him a new house and pay him…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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