SAVE Rivers, the Sarawak civil society organisation more synonymous with the fight against the state’s plan to construct mammoth hydroelectric dams, is charting a new path in forest conservancy.

With dam construction now on ice following a 2015 moratorium ordered by former chief minister Adenan Satem, Save Rivers has moved into agroforestry with the aim of improving food security for the state’s ethnic groups living in an around the Baram Peace Park through a community-driven sustainable project.

Agroforestry is sustainable with minimum impact on the environment, Save Rivers chairman Peter Kallang told The Malaysian Insight.

He said the venture was eight years in the making.

“The seed was sown when Adenan approved the Baram Peace Park,” he said of the pristine nature park deep in Baram, close to the Sarawak–Kalimantan border.

This is home and a “jungle supermarket” to indigenous groups like the Penans, Kelabits, Kenyahs and Sabans.

This Kenyah engineer-turned-activist said the project has some help from a local coffee planter and an Austrian agroforestry expert, who Kallang said had “helped a lot in research”.

The project kicked off with coffee planting, not readily available in this part of the world.

“The logical crops to start with are those which mature faster and allow the farmers to benefit sooner,” Kallang said.

He said soon vegetables, corn, vanilla, guava and other fast- growing crops would follow.

The patch for planting, in between trees, would also be planted with other more durable crops or fruit trees and local species of timber, he added.

“They plant on their own land. This is not large-scale industrial farming but a small sustainable project.

“We only facilitate the initiative to get the smallholders to carry out the project.”

The Save Rivers plan is to distribute the seedlings to people who want to buy them.

Samban Tugang, one of the project co-ordinators, said charging for the seedlings means people are serious about planting them.

“We have seen how seedlings given for free by the government end up in the store house. They never get planted.

“We want the people to be committed to the project.”

Samban said there is no minimum or maximum threshold, people buy whatever they can afford.

However, Save Rivers “tops up” each purchase to the tune of 75% of its value.

For example, if a smallholder buys RM10 worth of seedlings, then he or she would get another RM7.50 of seedlings for free.

Samban also pointed out the project is not a mere matter of planting.

“It’s about how it’s planted,” she said as one of Sarawak’s best known coffee experts, Edward Yong, had offered to share his expertise with participants in the project.

Yong, who also supplies the coffee seeds, runs planting workshops from time to time.

The coffee planting only started in the second half of last year.

Samban’s role is to monitor the delivery of seedlings to planting and the progress of the planting.

Kallang said to date, Save Rivers has supplied seedlings to Kenyah villagers at Long Tungan, Tanjung Tepalit, Long Siut and the Penans at Serungo.

The population of these villages and settlements is between 500 and 1,000. – February 2, 2023.