Installment Four: Your Food’s Story

June 12, 2004. Last week, I went to visit another NGO in Solo, about an hour away from Yogykarta. I was flying through rice fields and up steep rocky mountain roads on the back of a motorcycle. Soon I found myself ducking through a door frame and into a front room comprised of nothing more than a dirt floor, card table and a few basic chairs. Peering into the back room, I could make out a bed of bamboo, a table for preparing food, and a pile of corn in the dirt surrounded by chickens pecking away at it.

Eventually, we were joined at the table by a slight but strong little man with deep lines of hard work cut into his darkly tanned face. He proudly introduced himself as Sunardji, the owner of the house and farmer here for over 40 years. He showed me two documents so tattered I feared they would fall apart in my hands. One dated 1964 was official documentation giving him ownership of the surrounding farmland. The second was dated 1967, when a new government came into power and took his land away from him. That government was overthrown in 1998 and since then he has been fighting to reclaim his land. Two years ago, he and other farmers went on a hunger strike in front of the government buildings in Jakarta to try to persuade the government to give them back the land, but with no success.

Instead the new government sold it to a corporation that turned it into a rubber plantation. Sunardji now pays for the privilege of planting his rice and corn in-between its rubber trees. He tells me there are too many steps in the processing that cut away at the profits. He hasn’t made a profit in many years. Through this, I could only nod. What can you say to a man who, after a lifetime of hard manual labor is rewarded with poverty?

We went for a walk around part of the farm. It was planted on a mountain so steep, sweat was streaming down my back in a matter of minutes. I thought back to all my trips to the grocery store in Toronto and what went through my head as I walked down the aisles. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about the people who made the food, what their life was like.

After we got back, his wife brought plate after plate of fresh papaya that melted in my mouth. He asked me about farmers in Canada, what their situation was like, and consumers in Canada, what they thought of the situation for farmers here. It was painfully obvious that he was much more aware of who consumes his product than I was of who produced mine.