M

span class="inline inline-left">Maria Loretha at her sorghum field in her backyard. Courtesy of Maria LorethaFarmer Maria Loretha is very fond of her home in Adonara Island, East Flores.

It was not always like that when she came in 1999 to live with her husband, Jeremias Letor, a native of the island in East Nusa Tenggara. After spending time as college sweethearts in Malang-based Merdeka University, she learned love the hard way.

Being raised in the cities of Java, the Dayak native had to learn to live without electricity and limited food choices. Fish and land are abundant on the island, but she could not cultivate them with her law degree. To be a civil servant was impossible with the local government plagued by nepotism.

She adapted well by being a housewife and a mother until she felt the need to help her husband, who had inherited six hectares, to cultivate the land to make ends meet in 2005. She started to plant corn and foxtail millet alongside her husband’s coconut and cashew trees.

“This is what we have. I believe that God will provide and He doesn’t close his eyes,” she said.

In the middle of 2007, she received a plate of steamed sorghum with grated
coconut on it from a neighbor. She fell in love with the food and tried to find seeds to be able to cultivate it.

It was quite difficult to locate seeds. She finally found them in Ile Bura district, Flores Island. She bought 10 kg of sorghum seeds for Rp 150,000 (US$16.6).

Since then, sorghum has become an obsession for Maria. She travels to find and distribute seeds around East Nusa Tenggara. She does not sell them. She either uses them for her family or gives them away to farmers along her travels.

Her position as a land owner leading a group of farmers gave her the extra money to cover expenses for her travels. So far she has collected nine varieties of local sorghum and planted some of them.

“I don’t really know their names. I just know that they are different. I wish I could go to school to learn about them,” she said.

Maria describes her journey to introduce sorghum as “returning home”. People in East Nusa Tenggara consumed corn, banana and foxtail millet before the government started to introduce rice consumption through the green revolution programs in 1963 under the policy of Panca Usaha Tani (Five Agriculture Methods).

The movement was to support Soeharto’s aspiration of rice self-sufficiency, which succeded in 1984 . There were times when farmers still planted sorghum but the government told them to root out the plants and throw them away.

When she visited Manggarai, the western part of Flores, to introduce sorghum, she found deep nostalgia among the farmers. They cried, she said, they were moved that they could cultivate sorghum again.

She won East Nusa Tenggara’s 2011 Academia Award for science and technical innovation and the 2012 Kehati award for her persistence in conserving biodiversity.

Mostly consisting of arid land, Adonara and other parts of East Nusa Tenggara survive with various kinds of food throughout the year. Rice is the last option because dry-land rice is less productive and takes too long to harvest.

Maria said she usually starts first planting in October with rice, corn and foxtail millet because these crops need the water provided in the rain season. She only harvests rice once a year. She plants a little sorghum during this period and more afterwards. The sorghum is harvested three times a year.

She is always versatile in providing food for her four children. It is not only regular rice, but a mix. Sometimes it is one bowl of rice and another bowl of sorghum or a bowl of black rice, depending on what she has in her cupboard.

Many times in the island, she said, banana is so abundant that people feed their pigs with it.

“It is important for people who live in islands like Adonara to have freedom to choose what to plant and consume. And the govervent should realize that it makes us vulnerable just to rely on rice,” she said.

Maria opposes the use of transgenic seeds that she considers unsuitable for the temperature and the soil in her area. Such seeds also had short endurance, she said, after only two weeks they turned into powder. Local seeds, meanwhile, could be kept for a year.

Learning about climate change in her training programs, she understands that promoting local food security is part of adaptation. She said by maintaining local food diversity, island communities could be resilient against inconsistent food supplies from outside their regions.

“I found many problems troubling farmers in my travels. The government is the hardest to change in the way they see the farmers. They should side with farmers and think hard about their welfare, not side with big companies that sell seeds,” she said.

Aid is arriving in the region for development but rampant corruption means it hardly reaches farmers.

Maria, now 43 years old, is very fond of her home and the island. She wants nothing more than to watch her children grow up and to continue her research on her sorghum seeds. Things are changing around the island and she is very optimistic that it will get better.

Last year electriciy reached the island for the first time. Now citizens can enjoy it from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. There is Internet access although she has to sail for 40 minutes to an internet café in Larantuka, Flores.

In the fishing season, during a full moon, she takes time to fish with her family. Around 6 to 9 p.m., fish, mostly tuna, are visible beneath the water surface so everyone can just spear them.

“Opportunities are always out there. You just have to get your hands dirty,” she said.

And she did.

— Adisti Sukma Sawitri