Supporter: Oakley Brooks

“The staples are rising and the salary isn’t keeping pace,” 37-year-old rice farmer Zainbon says. Photo: Oakley Brooks for Mercy Corps

The wider world seems a long way from the rice paddies of Naga Umbang, a quiet village of 395 people backed by thrusting green mountains in Aceh province, at the tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island. These days, farmers draped in hats and t-shirts against the beating sun are bent over working seedlings into their rice paddies.

But all you have to do is mention food and fuel prices and the winds of a global crisis come rushing in. It's top of mind for nearly everyone working these paddies, and even those who used to have a semblance of financial security aren't spared.

Zainbon is a 37-year-old rice farmer with a black baseball cap perched atop her pink headscarf. Her husband mans a desk as a temporary, low-level bureaucrat in the district transportation office nearby, but still they struggle to find the rupiahs each month to get by. She pulls at her scarf explaining how they stretch six or seven dollars a day across the needs of cooking staples, school fees, fuel and now, in the fall planting season, fertilizer and rice seed. A Mercy Corps survey in the area recently found staple food prices climbing between 10 and 25 percent, on top of fuel prices that jumped 40 percent earlier this year.

"This is hugely important for us - the staples are rising and the salary isn't keeping pace," Zainbon says. "What about others whose husbands are just farming? They're struggling even worse."

This worldwide crisis is striking an area just starting to find its feet again after a vicious cycle of calamity. For decades, a rural separatist conflict kept many farmers out of their rice fields and fruit plantations for fear that they would be caught in the crossfire. Then in 2004, the Asian tsunami sent a wall of water up to 30 feet deep and flattened everything in the area, including the entire village of Naga Umbang.

With the houses now rebuilt, the rice paddies cleared of debris and new water buffalo roaming the yards, villagers are now teaming with Mercy Corps to strengthen their rice farming techniques and improve crop yields. And with food prices bearing down on locals, it couldn't come at a better time.

"We're working to bring the spirit and enthusiasm back to the farming sector because we really think there's great potential there," says Isnaini Djalil, Mercy Corps' rice project officer in Banda Aceh.

On a recent morning under the blazing equatorial sun, Mercy Corps partner and agricultural consultant Khainullah led a dozen Naga Umbang farmers to a test plot. Khainullah is staffing Mercy Corps' farmer field schools, which offer updated technique clinics to villagers in Aceh up to a dozen times throughout the three- to four-month rice season.

Khainullah waded into the plot in bare feet and, sinking into mud to his shins, planted green rice seedlings out in a gridded pattern 20 centimeters from each other. The technique, called legowo in Indonesian, spreads out the plants from the villagers' typically tight rows and is supposed to yield stronger harvests from increased exposure to the sun. It also cuts down on cover for pests such as mice and eases weeding.

Zainbon and two others stepped into the paddy to try out the new method. "Have you said a prayer?" an onlooker asked, as the crowd of farmers and NGO workers broke up laughing. In the deeply spiritual and Islamic Aceh, even this simple act might demand some offering. Zainbon shoved the plants into the mud without one.

Khainullah later explained how to use the fruits from certain palm trees to ward off snails in the paddy, how to bury weeded grass back underground to improve soil and save effort and how straight rows maximized space and yields. He also gave Zainbon some personal coaching on transplanting seedlings from a bed, telling her to move them at a younger age and without banging soil off the root ball, which can stress the plant.

Zainbon seemed rapt through most of the two-hour clinic.

"We need to modernize," she said through a translator. "We're already thinking about when Mercy Corps leaves here and this transfer of knowledge is one way we can build independence. Money from an NGO would go quickly, but knowledge and technology sticks in your mind."

The improved techniques are aimed at boosting incomes. Typically most of the rice harvest in villages like this goes to feed families. But if farmers in Naga Umbang can grow more efficiently, they will begin to see surplus rice from the same backbreaking labour they currently put into the season. And they will hopefully have the resolve to plant a second crop each year, which they can take to market in nearby cities.

That's the sort of security that the poor in Naga Umbang and around the world are seeking in these turbulent times.

"We need to pay attention to agriculture and go back to it," Zainbon said. "It's difficult if we just depend on income from government or other office jobs. But our prospects are better if we pay attention to the land and plant better crops."

Help us give a helping hand to hard-working women like Zainbon.

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