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Urban farmers withstand floods, pests in Jakarta’s surviving paddy fields
Recent floods had caused not only a delay in the rice planting season but also the abundance of pests in the paddy fields.
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An illustration of rice seeds. (Shutterstock/File)
T
he sun gently touched paddy in the middle of a dense neighborhood on a Thursday afternoon in Rorotan village, Cilincing district, North Jakarta, highlighting different colors of the paddy -- green on some fresh blocks and golden on others that were ready to harvest.
“After it rained, it took days to wait for submerged blocks to return to normal. So, as you can see, some plants are only 10 weeks old,” said Abdul Kadir, the Rorotan farmer group leader.
Recent floods had caused not only a delay in the rice planting season, Abdul said, but also the abundance of pests in the paddy fields and less efficient rice production.
“From 2014, there were always rats in every planting season. But it is only during the flood season like this that plenty of them come out their holes for fear of sheltering in the holes. They only cause trouble in the plantation area,” he added.
Even though poison bait has been spread on the ground, in the worst case, 50 percent of rice plants can fail. “As a result, some farmers choose to plant water spinach if their paddy blocks are badly attacked,” Abdul said.
The Rorotan paddy fields were among many other fields that survived the city’s rapid development and urbanization, yet it continued to decrease in size as time passed. From about 1,600 hectares in the 1980s, the total size of the Rorotan paddy fields is now less than 400 ha.
Some parts of the fields have been taken for several infrastructure projects, including the ongoing construction of the city’s zero-rupiah down-payment low-cost apartment complex, a flagship program of Governor Anies Baswedan.
