Parit and the Local Wisdom Behind Food Sovereignty in Indragiri Hilir

When talking about food sovereignty, Indonesia has long centred its ambitions on rice. The national imagination of food sovereignty has a single face: the paddy field. Through this lens, decades of policy have been built around meeting a constructed demand for rice as the primary staple across the archipelago. Government subsidies follow this logic, and so does land use. Forests and wetlands are increasingly being converted to accelerate this agenda, further complicated by the growing competition from agribusiness for biofuel production.

Differing from what Jakarta imagines, local communities across the archipelago have long fed themselves in various ways, shaped by local wisdom, traditional customs, and the landscapes they live in. In the wetland forests of eastern Indonesia, sago has long sustained generations in Papua and Maluku, thriving in landscapes where rice simply could not grow. In the wetlands of coastal Riau, communities have been cultivating coconut, areca nut, sugar palm, and sago since the Sriwijaya era, long before the modern Indonesian state drew its first map.

These local food practices were never built through a national-level policy. They were built from the ground up by people who learnt to live, eat, and make sense of the landscapes they inhabited. And yet today, they are barely visible in the national conversation about food sovereignty, squeezed between larger forces that either don't see them, or see them as problems to be solved.

Zooming in to Indragiri Hilir, a regency on the eastern coast of Riau, coconut farming has been a way of life for generations on its peatland-dominated landscape. Like other local food practices across the archipelago, it is deeply tied to generations of inherited wisdom about the land they live on.

At the heart of this system is the parit. Loosely translated as waterway, parit are not simply irrigation channels but a community-shaped water management system, built by generations of farmers who learnt to read tidal rhythms, regulate water levels, and sustain coconut production on coastal peatlands without draining them dry.

The parit system took shape through cultural interactions between Banjar, Bugis, Javanese, and Malay communities who migrated to this coastline centuries ago. In its early days, parit were dug entirely by hand, guided not by engineering manuals but by the natural direction of water flows and the pulse of the tides. Communities avoided clearing land along riverbanks, leaving mangrove and nipah trees intact as natural barriers against tidal currents. Over generations, what began as subsistence survival gradually became something more layered: a shared system of knowledge, governance, and livelihood that earned Indragiri Hilir its name as "the land of a thousand canals."

The Three Logic of Peatland Management

This parit system, however, does not exist without pressure, especially in this modern day where peatland gains increasing attention. Today, the same peatland that communities in Indragiri Hilir have farmed for centuries is viewed through at least three distinct logics for what it is and how it should be managed, as our latest TJF Brief notes.

The first is the drainage logic, which is held mostly by large-scale agribusiness concessions that see tropical peatland as underutilised and empty land with indifferent and infinite productive potential. In practice, this logic materialises through extensive draining that lowers water tables dramatically, prioritising large-scale plantations over ecological balance. Its most cautionary expression was the Mega Rice Project of the 1990s, which carved open-drainage canals across Central Kalimantan's deep inland peat landscape, severing its hydrology, triggering widespread degradation, as well as extensive fire. As a result, its catastrophic failure cast a long shadow, reinforcing a dominant narrative that all agricultural use of peatlands is inherently destructive. Smallholder coconut farmers, whose shallow tidal management is categorically different, were never exempt from that stigma.

The second is the restoration logic, which re-imagines peatland primarily as a carbon sink to be rewetted and protected. However, this logic often arrives with missions that clash with the tidal water management practices that communities have relied on for generations for their livelihoods.

Caught between these two is the traditional logic that built the parit in Indragiri Hilir in the first place. Through this logic, local communities aim to manage the water content suitable for their livelihoods but also the sustainability of the environment surrounding them, not draining the soil aggressively nor fully rewetting it. And yet it is the one that communities in Indragiri Hilir have carried and passed down for generations.

A Squeeze from All Sides

Over time, and aside from the external squeeze, modernisation has also quietly reshaped the parit from within. For earlier generations, parit were more than waterways. They were the spatial backbone of community life: people settled along them, governed through them, and organised religious and social life around them. Each parit had its own surau, a small prayer house that also served as a gathering place for the community. Each had its own leader. The waterway and the community were inseparable.

As modernisation drew people toward roads, village centres, schools, and healthcare, the parit gradually lost that fuller meaning. What was once a living landscape became, primarily, a plantation. The Wakil Parit, the community figure responsible for managing the canal and mediating disputes, still exists today, but operates with responsibilities that increasingly exceed their authority and capacity.

Of course, this internal erosion of meaning does not go unnoticed by the other two logics. As national-level food sovereignty agendas and biofuel agribusiness expand their reach into peatland territory, a weakened traditional system does not always shift entirely into the drainage logic. Some practices may partially drift toward it, others hold their ground. Yet from the outside, the distinction rarely registers—traditional parit and drainage canals increasingly get painted with the same brush, their water management practices are misread as part of the same extractive agenda, and their farmers are pushed to the margins.

At the same time, as the ecological damage from drainage intensifies, the restoration logic responds by tightening its rewetting mandates, and the traditional parit system finds itself accused of being part of the problem it never caused. The very practice that has sustained coastal peatlands for generations is increasingly treated as an obstacle, caught between a logic that wants to drain and a logic that wants to seal.

What is at stake here is not just the parit system in one regency of Riau. It is an entire category of locally-authored, ecologically calibrated food practices that have long sustained communities. Yet, they remain under-recognized in broader agricultural planning, whether for food sovereignty or biofuel development. This leaves them vulnerable to being displaced by approaches that are less attuned to local ecological realities.

As CIPS noted in their 2025 policy brief, the conversion of peatland and forest for food estate programs has been a recurring pattern across Indonesian administrations. An estimated 3.65 million hectares have been converted since the Soeharto era, with an additional 3 million hectares currently being targeted. Throughout this process, the local food practices already embedded in these landscapes were largely under-recognized. The agenda is further complicated by a growing national push for biofuel production, which has been designated as part of Indonesia's National Strategic Projects for 2025-2029. Together, these pressures add yet another layer of weight on landscapes that communities have been cultivating on their own terms for centuries.

The consequences are already visible on the ground. In Indragiri Hilir, farmers are increasingly reporting a condition locally known as ngetrek, where coconut palms drop much of their fruit before it matures, linked to disrupted water tables and shifting hydrological regimes. Yield losses can reach 70 to 90 percent in a single season, on palms that otherwise appear perfectly healthy. It is a quiet kind of loss, one that does not make headlines but accumulates steadily in the lives of communities who have managed these landscapes for generations.

The Conversation the Land Needs

What gets counted as food sovereignty says as much about who is doing the counting as it does about the land itself. The question is not whether practices like the parit system are worth preserving. Communities in Indragiri Hilir have already answered that, for centuries. The question is whether the national conversation about food sovereignty is ready to listen.

To learn more about the parit system as a hydrosocial territory, you can read the full TJF research brief here. For further updates on sustainable agriculture and local food security on peatlands, follow TJF on LinkedIn and Instagram.

References

1. Anam, K. (2025). Kupas Tuntas Peluang Pengembangan Bioetanol Demi Swasembada Energi. CNBC Indonesia. https://www.cnbcindonesia.com/news/20250509160126-4-632487/kupas-tuntas-peluang-pengembangan-bioetanol-demi-swasembada-energi 

2. Belseran, C. (2026). Jejak Ambisi Food Estate yang Menggerus Hutan Papua. Mongabay Indonesia. https://mongabay.co.id/2026/03/13/jejak-ambisi-food-estate-yang-menggerus-hutan-papua/

3. Herman, R. (2025). Parit: The Foundations of Agricultural Life in Indragiri Hilir. TJF Research Brief. Tay Juhana Foundation. https://be.tayjuhanafoundation.org/storage/652/01K8A5BRJ85920BHZQ9FNFB0K1.pdf

4. Herman, R. & Fawzi, N.I. (2026). Hydrosocial Territories: Traditional Water Management for Sustainable Coconut Agriculture on Tropical Coastal Peatlands. TJF Research Brief. Tay Juhana Foundation. https://be.tayjuhanafoundation.org/storage/747/01KQVV2XY5S9W42C8JRGSNTVW7.pdf

5. Horton, A.J., et al. (2021). Identifying key drivers of peatland fires across Kalimantan's ex-Mega Rice Project using machine learning. Earth and Space Science, 8(12). https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EA001873

6. Supriyanto, R., Maharani, A., & Alta, A. (2025). Menafsir Ulang Food Estate Indonesia: Jejak, Dinamika, dan Masa Depan Ketahanan Pangan Nasional. Center for Indonesian Policy Studies. https://www.cips-indonesia.org/publications/menafsir-ulang-food-estate-indonesia%3A-jejak%2C-dinamika%2C-dan-masa-depan-ketahanan-pangan-nasional

Tay Juhana Foundation (TJF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promote the advocacy of the conversion and cultivation of suboptimal lands into productive lands, through the most environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable manner.