A

s the Indonesian proverb goes: '€œWhere there is sugar, there are ants'€.

Indonesia'€™s rich natural resources have lured foreigners here for hundreds of years and today the country still has many charms waiting to be discovered.

With a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of around US$1,200 (World Bank data) and a growing middle class, Indonesia is an attractive consumer market. However, the flooding in of imported products is placing Indonesia'€™s rich cultural heritage and national identity at risk.  

One piece of cultural heritage that has successfully formed part of Indonesia'€™s national identity is batik. Once considered formal attire commonly worn by elders, batik has developed intensely, its patterns multiplying, with each region apparently competing to show it can craft the best varieties.

Unlike in the past, Indonesian people of all ages are now proud of donning batik clothes. Batik patterns have also been widely used for bags, shoes, scarves and even decorations such as table cloths, tissue boxes, placemats and countless more. Schools, government agencies and private companies have jumped onto the batik bandwagon by making their own batik uniforms or requiring employees to wear batik on particular days.

The international community has recognized batik as part of Indonesian culture, as evident in batik'€™s inclusion in UNESCO'€™s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity on Oct. 2 four years ago. The government then declared Oct. 2 as National Batik Day. This international recognition shows that the love for batik goes beyond the country'€™s territorial borders.

However, little do Indonesians realize or actually care that batik is currently '€œunder attack'€. At the very least there are two external threats against Indonesian batik. First is the wide use of printed batik. Second is foreign businessmen who pour a lot of money into copying the design of Indonesian batik.

The actual definition of batik puts emphasis on the method used to produce it, not just the patterns or designs of the textile. This complicated method is one of the reasons why real batik is now outperformed by printed batik. On the one hand, consumers prefer printed batik due to its cheaper price than real batik, and on the other real batik producers are difficult to find because of regeneration that does not work.

Many youths may be interested in wearing batik, but not in producing it. Few are even able to tell the difference between real batik and printed batik.

Printed batik has many advantages in the eyes of local Indonesians, such as more intricate designs, apart from its lower prices. In the eyes of producers, printed batik is also much easier and faster to make in order to catch up with the skyrocketing demand for batik.

They forget, however, that printed batik is not actually real batik, but merely a textile that is printed with batik patterns. Let us compare it with the Indonesian National Standard'€™s definition of batik, which is a textile colored by a method of covering using batik wax to cover certain parts of the textile, forming written batik, stamped batik or a combination of the two. The definition gives a clear distinction of what is batik and what it is not.

The more people prefer buying and wearing printed batik, the more crafters of real batik will lose their market. If the problem persists and is left unaddressed it will come as no surprise if someday we lose this valuable national heritage.

The foray of printed batik is a big worry, but it is not too late to contain it. The government has started an initiative to provide labeling for real batik. This labeling, called the '€œbatik mark'€, will only be awarded to producers who have been proven to only produce and sell real batik.

However, this effort does not seem enough, possibly because the producers, who are mostly small- and middle-scale enterprises (SMEs), cannot afford the high price of securing this label.

So what should we do to protect batik as our cultural heritage?

Educating the people is the most important effort that we can easily do together. We have to make people aware of different kinds of batik. This includes the ladder of batik quality, with written batik being at the top of the pyramid and printed batik being nowhere.

The most important point when educating the people is to spread awareness that printed batik is not actually batik and that by buying printed batik, we are actually making the true batik producers and our own national heritage suffer.

The writer teaches at the faculty of economics, the University of Indonesia.