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Indonesian Coal Mining Boom Is Leaving Trail of Destruction

December 18, 2015

Indonesian Coal Mining Boom Is Leaving Trail of Destruction

Since 2000, Indonesian coal production has increased five-fold to meet growing domestic demand for electricity and feed export markets in Asia. The intensive mining is leading to the clearing of rainforest and the pollution of rivers and rice paddies.

Standing on a hilltop in Kerta Buena, an Indonesian village on the island of Borneo, local farmers look out over a blackened moonscape. In the 1980s the land was forested, but now it is pockmarked with craters where miners have clawed coal from the earth. On a recent November afternoon, trucks crisscrossed the site on their way to and from riverside coal barges in the nearby provincial capital of Samarinda. The sound of their engines reverberated across the barren landscape.

Dadang Tri/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Excavators work in an open pit coal mine at the PT Exploitasi Energi site in South Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Kerta Buena lies in northeastern Borneo, an island larger than France that is primarily split between Indonesia and Malaysia. ITM, the Indonesian company that owns the mine, says it produces 29 million tons of coal per year on sites across Indonesian Borneo that cover nearly 200,000 acres — half of them on land the government designates as “production” forest. Although an ITM spokesman said the company’s mining sites have five-year reclamation plans in accordance with Indonesian law, some Kerta Buena farmers complain that wastewater from coal mining activities is leaking into rice paddies and damaging their harvests. Acid mine drainage across Borneo has killed fish in aquaculture operations, and farming communities — often located next to coal mines — must contend with coal dust that routinely coats crops and seeps into their homes.

“I don’t have a voice to express my concerns,” said one farmer, Made Sari. The reduced harvest costs her hundreds of dollars per year, she said, and pollution from coal mining may force her to return to her ancestral village in the Indonesian island of Bali.

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