The peasant communities of Tukdana in the province of Indramayu, a region located northwest of Jakarta (Indonesia), face continuous acts of violence and threats from a state-owned sugar company. In 2019, the company forced the peasants to accept a partnership agreement to plant sugarcane, which many opposed. SPI, the largest peasant organization in the country, arrived in the region in 2021 to support the peasant struggle, organize them, and resist through occupation and cultivation of the land, as well as engage in a legal battle for the recognition of peasant rights to the land. As part of the resistance, a participatory communication workshop was held with 15 young activists from the region and with international trainers to create communication materials, thus appropriating the narrative of the conflict from a perspective of the peasant struggle for land.

Since 2021, the peasant communities of Tukdana in the province of Indramayu, a region located northwest of Jakarta (Indonesia), have faced continuous acts of violence and threats from the sugar factory PG Rajawali II, a subsidiary of the state-owned company PT Rajawali Nusantara Indonesia (PT-RNI), which bribes the police and uses its employees to attack peasants. For years, members of Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI), the largest peasant organization in the country and a member of La Vía Campesina, have occupied the lands adjacent to the sugar factory. They cultivate rice, vegetables, and fruit trees, raise sheep, and engage in other economic activities to survive. Occupying and labouring the vacant land is a form of peasant resistance.

In 2019, some farmers decided to openly resist the sugar company’s plans to impose a partnership agreement that forced them to plant sugarcane for the company. As a result, they were harassed, their homes were burned, and their rice fields and mango trees were uprooted. “We used to plant rice here, initially feeling safe, but after two years they started harassing us. Every year they harass us, and our land is often destroyed. The mango trees that have been fruiting for five years have been knocked down,” explains Mr Damar, a farmer leader.

The monoculture of sugarcane does not allow them to make ends meet or meet their basic needs since it only yields one harvest per year, and most of the profits go to the company. In fact, some farmers who accepted the agreement with the company have been trapped in a sea of debt. Furthermore, being unable to plant their own crops or obtain other food from the fields limits their food sovereignty.

Peasants who decided to openly resist the state-owned sugar company’s plans have been harassed, their houses burned, and their land destroyed.

The land conflict dates back to 1976 when the Ministry of Agriculture declared the 12,000 hectares of land, previously considered a forest zone, as productive land. This was done through an exchange with the Forestry Ministry, to whom they had to hand over another 12,000 hectares of land in the same province to be considered forested. The Ministry of Agriculture then offered the new lands to a state-owned company called PTP, which began evicting peasant communities to establish a sugar factory. Some peasants chose to migrate, others opted to work for the sugar company, and others resisted.

In 1996, the factory was acquired by the state-owned company PT Rajawali Nusantara Indonesia (RNI), which today operates ten sugar factories and 15 subsidiary companies involved in agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and product distribution and trade. Although the company is owned by the Indonesian state, it operates like a private multinational corporation competing in a global capitalist system. It has a significant impact on the region’s ecosystem and consistently violates the rights of peasant communities in the name of “national development”.

In 1976, the government offered land considered forested to the state-owned company PTP to establish a sugar factory. Peasant communities lived on these lands: some decided to migrate, others to work for the factory, and others to resist.

Algunos de los campesinos que se quedaron resistieron ocupando la tierra.

For this reason, and in the face of the states’ neglect of communities, in 2021, SPI established itself in the region with an office in Indramayu and began organizing farmers to occupy the land and resist the company. The company responded by partnering with employees and other landless farmers who acted on its behalf to regain control over the land and create tensions within the communities. In July 2022, 12 farmers were arrested after violent clashes between SPI members and company employees, resulting in two deaths.

Currently, SPI Indramayu has 630 members who collectively cultivate 430 hectares of land. In addition to occupying unused lands and promoting agroecological crops, SPI initiated a legal battle to invalidate the 1976 agreement between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Forestry Ministry, as the former never provided alternative lands as part of the exchange. This would allow farmers to assert their rights to the land and obtain legal permission to cultivate it under the national agrarian reform plan.

SPI Indramayu has 630 members and between them they cultivate 430 hectares of unused land through agroecological processes. They have also initiated a legal battle to obtain their land rights back.

Owning the conflict narrative

In September 2023, SPI organized a participatory photography and video workshop with the support of La Vía Campesina, FIAN International, and the Land, Forests, Water, and Territories Working Group of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (GT-CIP). The workshop aimed to empower young activists associated with SPI in the region to explain the conflict’s history and take ownership of the narrative. Until then, national and regional media had portrayed peasant communities falsely as the cause and instigators of the conflict, labelling them as communists.

The workshop was conducted by the MiRu (Mirada Rummiant) Association from Barcelona, Spain, specializing in educational processes and participatory communication, and the Argentine communication agency Hornero.dig. Over 10 days, four trainers and a group of 15 young people from different regions of Java Island, Indonesia, gathered in Indramayu to co-create materials that would explain the area’s conflict from a peasant perspective.

The first three days were dedicated to sharing the necessary knowledge for content creation, brainstorming and conceptualizing communicative products, and establishing thematic focus and formats that could best communicate the collective story. Three working groups were formed to create content for three different formats: Narrative photo-reportage for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp statuses, TikTok videos, and a short documentary for YouTube.

SPI organized a participatory photography and video workshop to train young activists from the region so that they could tell their own story and take ownership of the conflict narrative.

Jóvenes activistas indonesios creando los materiales comunicativos para redes.

During the following days, the working groups went to the conflict zone to take photos, conduct interviews, and record videos. The community and the team worked to build trust, ensuring that community members appearing in the images felt comfortable. Meals and leisure moments were shared to foster better mutual understanding between everyone involved.

Once back in Indramayu, the participants and trainers dedicated themselves to selecting, editing, and assembling the materials to generate the communication products. The groups worked for hours to finalize some of the materials before the end of the workshop so they could be shown to SPI representatives. A visual identity was conceptualized, and a collective process was undertaken to design the campaign logo, with six proposals from groups that were voted on by all participants and SPI representatives during a plenary session.

The final results developed over the 10 days were also presented in this session, gathering all comments and suggestions to ensure the contents aligned with the organization’s strategy and accurately represented the conflict and peasant communities. The objective was for SPI and the communities to use these materials in their social media communication to raise awareness about the conflict and demand reparations from the Indonesian government.

Three working groups went to the conflict zone to take photos, record interviews and record videos. They worked to build trust with the community and shared moments of leisure.

Results

After the workshop concluded, the participants and the training group continued working online over the following months to finalize the materials and polish all the details.

For the photography series, four narrative photo sets were created with distinct themes representing peasant life and struggle:

• Diversify: diversify crops to combat the agricultural monoculture industry and ensure food sovereignty for communities.
• Organize: the establishment of cooperatives, agricultural unions, and peasant organizations to create production alternatives and reduce dependence on markets and large capitalist enterprises.
• Redistribution: redistribution of land to landless peasants as a key measure to eliminate inequalities in rural areas and contribute to global justice.
• Work and resist: working and occupying ancestral land as a way of life and resistance.

These were published on SPI’s social media platforms (Instagram).

The 10-minute documentary provides a deeper insight into the conflict with direct testimonies from affected peasants. Despite being produced in record time with participants who had no prior professional video experience, the result has been exceptional.

The three TikTok videos, each about 46 seconds long, addressed overlapping themes related to the land conflict, such as air and soil pollution caused by the sugar company’s operations, generational succession among young peasants, and the invisible labour of women peasants. A more joyful and engaging language was used to attract a younger audience and promote agriculture as something attractive and indispensable to society.

The results have been truly exceptional, and the methodological process is expected to be adopted by other peasant organizations to create their own narratives.