Batam can be a little wild and men from Singapore go there for a dirty weekend. Batam is also where the pirates working the Malacca Strait come from.
In 2007 Lloyds of London declared the Malacca Strait a war zone and in 2016 the centre for cases of piracy at sea moved from the Somali coast to the Malacca Strait — and I crossed from Malacca, in Malaysia, to Dumai in Riau.
Roughly half of the world's container ships and two-thirds of the oil shipments pass through the Malacca Strait and these days ships come through at full throttle to avoid being boarded. Low to the waterline vessels such as tugs pulling barges are particularly vulnerable.
The Malacca Strait has a long history of piracy. Sumatran pirates were capturing Chinese junks in the strait before the Portuguese arrived in Malacca in the 16th century.
Since Covid and the layoffs in the tourist industry there has been a rise in piracy.
The pirates sometimes take just the crew's money or diesel fuel; sometimes entire tankers disappear. The coastguard from Malaysia or Singapore can't pursue pirates into Indonesian or Philippino waters and shipping organisations are calling on China and the United States to take a more active role in policing piracy.
The once extensive peat swamps of Riau have been drained and turned into a monoculture. The road we took from Dumai to Pekanbaru was lined by palm oil trees and as we neared the equator the sky turned red from the yearly peat fires. Life looked hard and the young people we met wanted to go to Batam and ultimately Singapore.
Shortly after independence from the Dutch Indonesia's population stood at 100 million and hit 200 million just before 2000 — doubling in 32 years. Indonesia's population is rapidly approaching 300 million. One solution was to relocate millions of Indonesians from crowded Java to underdeveloped Sumatra — and Riau was ground zero.
Every year a dozen or so people are killed by the endangered Sumatran tiger and there are still reports of wild elephants, pythons and tigers being killed in Riau as the last of their habitat is encroached on.
Riau is Indonesia's main producer of palm oil and crude oil and was a tourist destination.
The largest remaining peat swamp in Riau, the Kampar peninsula, should be preserved — if only for a wildlife refuge and for future tourists.
Since Covid all Indonesian visa-free and visa on arrival concessions have been canceled and the tourist industry in Riau has been decimated. Only designated foreigners on government invitations to work on national projects are allowed in. Indonesia just let 450 Chinese workers into Riau to install a coal-fired steam power system and bauxite smelter — as if Riau needed more smoke.
In another Covid related news item 58 indigenous Sakai farmers, from Riau, were released from jail because of the coronavirus.
They had been arrested for cutting down quick growing acacia and eucalyptus trees to plant their sweet potatoes on land that they had lived on for hundreds of years but had been leased by the Riau government to forestry companies growing pulpwood for paper factories.
Covid has disrupted an already precarious economy in Indonesia and millions at the bottom are barely feeding themselves.
Traditionally during an economic downturn Indonesian workers go back to their village and help growing rice, etc — and the Malay fishermen take up piracy.
