Indonesia — Joy sat by the seashore on the outskirts of Jakarta patching up his fishing nets, repairing each tear with practiced stitches while a clutch of women shelled green mussels as the afternoon wore on.
“Later on, at 4, we’ll head out to sea,” said Joy, who usually earns up to 500,000 rupiah ($32) from a single catch.
However, like many here on the shoreline of Indonesia’s capital city, Joy worries that a dearth of fish, and the changes unfolding near his home, suggest this livelihood exists on borrowed time.
As each year passes, fishers throughout the northern coast of Indonesia’s main central island of Java must venture farther out to sea for a viable catch to sustain their families.
Fishing communities around the world face an incoming tide of ocean acidification and sea temperature rises, which threaten fish stocks, a crucial source of protein and income in these villages.
Yet the fishing community here in Ketapang, a village in the Tangerang district that makes up part of the Greater Jakarta area, also has to contend with a crude bamboo fence hindering access to the Java Sea.
When the bamboo barrier first appeared, obstructing fishers from leaving the harbor, a flotilla of fishing boats coalesced in its removal. Local fishers said people working on behalf of a developer replaced the barricade soon enough, this time brandishing a letter of authorization from the village government.
“You can’t see it at night and the boat can hit it,” Joy explained. “The waves can make it difficult for the boat to turn, so it hits the bamboo and you end up with a leak.”
Joy division
The barricade dividing Joy from his traditional livelihood reflects the latest development in the transformation of much of Indonesia’s coastal cities.
At a planned 6,000 hectares (14,800 acres), more than half the size of Paris, the Pantai Indah Kapuk II residential and commercial project, known as PIK2, aspires to be “the latest masterpiece presented by Agung Sedayu Group & Salim Group,” the former wrote on its website. A modest 1% of the multibillion-dollar construction is reserved for what the developers call a “Green Belt,” amid high-end restaurants, a “European quarter” with Dutch-style architecture and Italian gondolas, and an international stadium.
Civil society groups expressed surprise earlier this year when the government included PIK2 on its list of national priority projects. That designation could inoculate the developers against legal challenges, cut through red tape, and elicit government help in land acquisition.
Private and state-owned companies, including Indonesia’s largest financial institution, Bank Mandiri, have earmarked office buildings in PIK2. Construction was scheduled to commence this year and be completed in 2060.
The bamboo fence in Ketapang demarcates the site of a port to be built in connection with PIK2, according to the head of the subdistrict encompassing the village. Joy knows that sooner or later there will be commotion, a thicket of police and the implied threat of force if his neighbors cling to their homes.
“We’re at home on the sea, we wouldn’t know what to do on land,” Joy said. “And what would we do with our boats?”
No one here seems to know where they’ll go when the time comes. Joy worries about what to do with his fishing equipment.
Agriculture remains the largest employer in Indonesia, but an expanding services sector staffed by young people migrating from rural to urban areas is driving job creation. Indonesia counted 15 million new service sector jobs in the previous decade, according to a report published in 2020 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
That shift has led inexorably to a shortage of housing in urban areas, with many of the country’s most economically vulnerable, like Joy, forced to abandon homes, identity and traditional vocations to make way for development.
“We common people can’t fight the big companies,” Joy said, adding that he feared going to prison: “If we resist even a little, we’ll be put away.”
A 2020 report on housing published by the World Bank summarized the result of Indonesia building too few homes for its growing urban population.
“Projections of urban population growth highlight the housing need for 780,000 new household formations per year until 2045, while tackling an existing ownership backlog of 12.1 million units and improving millions of substandard homes,” the report noted.
Studies have linked poor-quality housing with a web of diseases, from cardiovascular and respiratory conditions to poor mental health, as well as acute infections like meningitis and tuberculosis.
An overcrowded home is associated with slower growth in children and poorer educational outcomes, restricting opportunity and poverty reduction.
Inside the line
Sinking up to 15 centimeters (6 inches) per year, Jakarta faces subsidence at a rate unmatched by any megacity in the world. The risk of inundation in Jakarta’s northern neighborhoods influenced former president Joko Widodo’s decision to plan a new capital city on Borneo, another nascent national priority project displacing local populations.
Despite this instability, Jakarta continues to expand its and draw more groundwater from its dwindling aquifers. The PIK2 development has absorbed much of Kosambi and Teluknaga subdistricts to the west of the city limits, impacting fishing communities along the shoreline.
In Teluknaga, around 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of Joy and his worn fishing nets, a bamboo barricade also blocks the fishing boats of Muara village from accessing the sea.
“There are many prohibitions in PIK, and there are many security guards on duty,” a local man told Mongabay Indonesia in June.
Before the developer laid claim to the land and installed fencing in the Java Sea, fishers here were free to navigate up and down the coast.
Now the few who eke out a living must take the scenic route, an awkward detour through a protected mangrove forest that can damage fishing nets.
Some have tried to adapt by setting traps overnight instead of fishing with nets. However, anecdotal testimony suggests the access restrictions have depressed local incomes.
Joni, a fisher in Kohod village, said he used to be able to earn up to 200,000 rupiah ($13) in a day just from collecting crabs, before any income he earned from regular fishing.
“Now, it’s hard to even earn 50,000 rupiah [$3],” Joni told Mongabay Indonesia. “And that’s eaten up by operational costs.”
From safety to where…?
From palm oil firms sidestepping payments to small farmers for their land, to a government proposal for a 2-million-hectare (5-million-acre) sea of sugarcane in the eastern Papua region, allegations of insufficient land compensation to Indonesia’s low-income citizens persist.
In Tanjung Burung, another coastal village in PIK2’s development area, Samid and former rice farmer Rina are among many now without work or looking for jobs as farmland is picked off for the development. Samid’s family used to depend on a smallholding of 200 coconut palms.
“Now there are none,” he said. “I was never compensated for the 200 coconut trees.”
Rina tended a 4-hectare (10-acre) rice field for someone else, producing multiple harvests a year and splitting the revenue with the landowner.
“I took care of it for 39 years,” she told Mongabay Indonesia. “This room used to be full with rice.”
The land has since been taken over. Rina is now unemployed, and Samid struggles to get by on casual labor.
Resisting the PIK2 project would mean taking on powerful tycoons such as Sugianto Kusuma, the influential owner of property developer Agung Sedayu Group. In 2016, one of Sugianto’s underlings was sentenced to three years in prison for paying a 2 billion rupiah ($127,000) bribe to the speaker of the Jakarta City Council in connection with a zoning plan for the city’s northern coast. The Salim Group too is owned by one of Indonesia’s richest families.
Ujang Sudiartono, head of the planning agency in Tangerang district, said the local government lacked authority because the PIK2 development is a national priority project, administered by Indonesia’s central government.
“We only follow the program initiated by the center,” Ujang said. “What will happen in the future? We’re also still waiting.”
Suyus Windayana, secretary-general of the land ministry, said he didn’t have sufficient information about land acquisition linked to the project.
“The community must receive fair value, whether for the price of the land, or the value on the land — meaning the crops, houses and so on,” Suyus said, adding that any public report to his office would be investigated.
“We’ll check the land ownership, and according to the regulations, the community should receive their fair rights and not be at a disadvantage,” he said.
Fadli Afriadi, head of the national ombudsman’s office for Banten province, where Tangerang district is located, said he had visited community leaders, informed local residents of their rights, and would investigate any alleged infraction pertaining to land acquisition. At the time of writing, the agency had yet to receive any report from the public, according to Fadli.
“We will protect the identity of the complainants and ensure they are not harmed by any report they submit to the ombudsman,” Fadli said.
Attempts to contact the PIK2 developers went unanswered. Mongabay contacted the corporate secretary and investor relations lead at PT Pantai Indah Kapuk Dua (PANI), the Agung Sedayu Group subsidiary developing PIK2, as well as the communications head at the parent group. Neither responded to requests for comment.
Parid Ridwanuddin, coastal campaign lead at the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the country’s biggest environmental NGO, said the displacement felt by Joy and others reflected the “dark side” of national infrastructure projects.
“Communities are drastically losing access to the coast and the sea,” Parid said, characterizing the coastal development in Tangerang district as a form of “ocean grabbing.”
He added it’s disappointing to see coastal areas increasingly closed off, particularly in Jakarta and now Tangerang, where clean and accessible shorelines are almost nonexistent.
In 2015, then-president Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, announced a target to construct 1 million homes per year, subsequently rolling out mortgage down payment assistance and financial support for home renovations.
A decade later, the new administration led by Jokowi’s chosen successor, Prabowo Subianto, who took office last month, wants to accelerate this construction to 3 million homes every year.
A short drive inland, a pair of the PIK2 developer’s aquamarine excavators dissects a rice field for a new road.
The sun has washed out the colors painted on fishing boats moored port to starboard in the harbor. It’s not long before 4 p.m. when Joy usually goes to sea to work.
