Meetings, numbers and traffic jams

Monday and Tuesday:  Java is full of wonderful people; crowded in fact. Getting to meetings in Jakarta means sitting in traffic for way too long. And then hearing mind-boggling stories and statistics of a country and its resources being sold from under them, as if the people didn't exist. And often the World Bank or other "development" banks are involved.

On Monday, SPI staff at Via Campesina headquarters mentioned that Indonesia plans to have 8,500,000 hectares of land turned over to palm oil plantations (for agrofuels for China and ...). What does that look like? Begin with Indonesia being as wide, end-to-end, as Canada. And Haiti's land mass being about 2.something million hectares. That's huge. Among other things, SPI helps farmers reclaim unused land.

On Tuesday, we met some staff at KPI, D&P's largest partner in Asia with 28,000 members, mostly at the village level. They casually mentioned that 80% of Indonesia lives in the rural areas. KPI is a women's organization. They've been involved in challenging some of the assumptions of the water laws, including that people shouldn't collect rain water because it's dirty, and that anyway the water companies will provide it to them. Can't help thinking of the Jakarta community we met on Saturday where the women look forward to the rain as a source of free water.