Marine sports event aims to heal local welfare woes

Dina Indrasafitri, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Sat, 06/12/2010 10:18 AM

The Sail Banda event to be held in Maluku promises hope for future economic development and improved welfare a decade after the province was ravaged by bloody sectarian conflict.

Maluku Governor Karel Albert Ralahalu said Friday the government would announce his province as the country’s national fishery buffer stock region.

“We pray that on Aug. 3, 2010, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will officially announce Maluku as a national fishery storage area and this plan will revive Maluku province’s maritime and fishery development,” he said in a press conference in Jakarta. Sail Banda is slated to kick off next month and will run until mid-August.

The maritime affairs and fisheries minister said the Sail Banda yacht rally would be preceded by a charity event involving the United States’ hospital ship USNS Mercy.

The USNS Mercy, along with local ship KRI Dr. Suharso SHS-990 and ships from Singapore and Australia, will channel aid, as well as procedures related to maternal and child health to a number of areas, including Banda Island and Seram Island.

During an event on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) earlier this year, the Health Ministry cited data from the 2007 basic health research.

It revealed that Maluku ranked second after East Nusa Tenggara in terms of malnutrition.

Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Fadel Muhammad said the event was marked by its philanthropic support. “What makes [Sail Banda] different from Sail Bunaken, is the abundance of social [charity] events,” he said. Last year, the country hosted the Sail Bunaken marine festival off Manado in North Sulawesi.

Karel said that despite progress made since the post-conflict days, Maluku province was still struggling. “During the riots, our economic development growth rate has been minus 26 percent; nowadays… our economic growth is almost 6 percent,” he said, adding that he hoped the Sail Banda would boost the province’s welfare.

Fadel said that his ministry was planning to lure investors from China, Australia and Japan to boost the province’s fishery activity.

The Sail Banda event will feature a number of activities such as marine sports, mangrove planting and the celebration of the nation’s Independence Day in Kisar Island, one of Indonesia’s outermost islands.

The yacht rally is scheduled to flag off from Darwin, Australia on July 24. Thus far, 106 ships from 16 countries have registered.

Coordinating Public Welfare Minister Agung Laksono said the proposed budget for the event was Rp 161 billion.

Key river suffers upstream, downstream pollution

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Fri, 12/11/2009 11:16 AM

Up a creek without a paddle: A survey team motors through the Citarum River estuary in Muara Gembong district, Bekasi. Despite frequent tidal floods, the river bank is home to many people who come from around the country to earn a living as fishermen. The Citarum River has often been called the world’s dirtiest river. Courtesy of Cita-Citarum/Diella Dachlan

Despite the country’s ambitious plans to provide sustainable access to clean water for 80 percent of the urban population by 2015, its capital is still struggling to fix an enduring problem facing one of its key rivers.

The target, set in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), starkly contrasts with the fact that the Citarum River, one of the most vital sources of drinking water for Jakarta, is often referred to as the world’s dirtiest river.

Saiful, the new chairman of the Association of Indonesian Tap Water Companies (Perpamsi), said last Thursday in Batam only 40 percent of the urban population and less than 30 percent of the rural population had sustainable access to clean water.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) stated the Citarum River Basin Territory supported a population of 28 million people, produced 20 percent of Indonesia’s gross domestic product and provided 80 percent of the surface water supply to the capital.

Director of the National Development Planning Agency’s directorate of water resources and irrigation, M. Donny Azdan, said the river, which flows 300 km from Mount Gunung Wayang in West Java to the Pantai Bahagia coast in Bekasi, faces a multitude of problems, which the country is trying to tackle.

“The problem upstream is erosion due to agriculture, which dumps a lot of soil into the river. [Further downstream] there’s also the contamination by farm, domestic and industrial waste that is dumped into the river,” he said.

The Majalaya area in West Java, for example, is home to many textile industries that pollute the river, he said during a river expedition Saturday.

The two-day expedition was set up by the Association of Jungle Explorers and Mountain Climbers (Wanadri).

The Citarum was once a familiar training and exploration area for the association, which conducted its first expedition there in 1985, Abrar Prasodjo, the head of the expedition, said.

“The river is necessary for our purposes. We wanted to conduct a training session in Saguling [West Java] but the water was foamy,” he recalled.

Abrar said the expedition was expected to provide new information that would be relayed to the authorities and the community who would take the necessary steps to improve the state of the river, thus allowing the association’s members and the residents to benefit from Citarum’s water.

One man’s garbage: A man wades in the Citarum River in the Majalaya area, West Java next to a garbage pile on the riverbank. The water is heavily contaminated by untreated waste from textile plants. Courtesy of Cita-Citarum/Steve Griffiths

The heavy pollution of the river is also evident in its estuary in Muara Gembong, Bekasi.

An area in Muara Gembong, ironically named Pantai Bahagia (Happy Beach), constantly suffers from tidal and other floods. The coastline, once thick with mangroves, is now the site of a fishing village where wooden boats have to navigate through a layer of rubbish.

“Its as if the ground sinks lower by 10 centimeters each year,” Erik, a resident, said of the increasingly serious floods.

Carsim, another resident who was in an elevated sitting space to avoid coming in contact with the dirty water, said around 20 years ago, the area had not been as crowded as it was now and the mangrove forest dominated the landscape.

Abrar said the constant destruction of the mangrove forest also endangered the area’s ecosystem.

“There used to be a lot of birds and monkeys here, but now the mangrove is very thin,” he said as the expedition team navigated the river.

Donny said the road to restore, or at least improve, the Citarum River was a long and rocky one.

“We calculate there are around 80 separate actions that need to be taken, which will take around 15 to 20 years to do. The cost would be around Rp 35 trillion, [US$3.7 billion]” he said.

Given this estimate and the fact that the country has over 5,000 rivers with eleven of them critically polluted, would fulfilling the MDG for clean water be realistic?

“No,” he said, laughing. “We’re having problems with just one river!” (dis)