TG and his parents are small rice growers from kampung Alab Lanas Sook Keningau in Borneo. Here are their thoughts about their challenges and importance of rice in their life.

We are growing rice only for ourselves, our personal consumption, for a family of 6, plus the dogs.

We have two types of rice: hill and irrigated rice. Hill rice we have 1 acre, and irrigated half of the hectare. If the climate is good, not too hot, from 1 acre we can get 40-50 sacks of 25kg bags. Our family finish it in 1,5-year.

Rice is our daily food, we eat it 3 times per day, also we make rice wine from it for all the villagers, it bring us some money from which we can survive.

It’s very difficult to prepare land for rice on a hill, usually it’s a land close to a jungle. It has a lot of trees and branches which need to be cut, it needs a lot of hard work. While the irrigated rice land is easy, just need to flatten it and remove some grass. But for irrigation need always to check water level, for the hill ones, we just plant and depend on the rain, they don’t need much water. These are different variety rice.

Our native people, ancestors, were planting and harvesting rice in the same lands as we do now, our families live here for a very long time, so we kind of inherited it, we call it “native customary right”. But this land, this forest reserve where we work still belongs to the government and anytime they can reserve the land for someone else, for a company, and we will loose all the paddies, our the main food source, we will not be allowed to go to our native lands. This is what is happening widely in Borneo, we are trying fight, but it’s very difficult.

Climate change is a big problem for us. For a long time we knew when to plant paddies, which depends on the season, usually it’s the same time, but now, we still plant the same time, but every year the climate is changing drastically and we can’t predict the growth. When supposed to be raining, is very hot, or other way around.

To plant and to collect the harvest we use only hands. We use the same methods as our ancestors. Now we use fertilizer, which we haven’t used before, it make everything much easier, we can spend less time in the fields. Before, we had to remove grass by hand, which takes over 2 weeks, now, no need to do that.

Rice is extremely important in our life, because it’s our daily food. It’s our number one food, our daily diet our ancestors grew up on it, and we the same.

Also in our village it’s almost free, just need to work on the land, but it doesn’t cost much. Another benefit, rice is carbohydrates, so it gives a lot of energy for us to work in the fields.

We work in the fields together with the neighbors, we help them, then they come to help us, it strengthens the community also.