A Borneo Indigenous community turned a decades-old power dynamic on its head when they got a corporation to leave their ancestral rainforests alone.

By Timothy Workman

The people of Long Isun recently scored a major commitment from the Harita Group, an Indonesian agribusiness, to cease all logging on their ancestral lands—a remarkable turn of events in a country where corporations usually win.

Indonesia’s pro-corporate land use system has caused decades of devastating deforestation, mostly in Borneo and Sumatra, as corporations claim millions of hectares of land for plantations and extractive industries.

This has pushed many Indigenous and local communities off their land, the vast majority of whom don’t have land rights—just 13.8% of Indigenous lands have formal recognition, despite the Indonesian government’s 2013 promise to hand over Indigenous forests.

The people of Long Isun almost became another casualty of this historic land grab in 2014 when they awoke to an invasion of workers and heavy machinery into their ancestral forests, deep in the heart of Borneo.

Long Isun ritual leader Kristina Yeq in July 2022. Credit: Khairul Abdi

Community members managed to peacefully convince the workers to leave, but in response, police arrested and jailed a prominent community member for 109 days without trial. Thus began a decade-long struggle against Harita.

Long Isun successfully barred Harita from a small part of their territory in 2018, but their bid to gain formal land rights stalled out. It was only when they turned to an international audience that they started to make real progress.

In 2023, we told the story of Long Isun to our supporters and the general public, exposing Harita’s connections to major household brands like Oreo and Head & Shoulders. After a while, Harita came to its senses, committing to never return to Long Isun, stating that the community had not consented to logging inside their territory.

This highlights the power of corporate pressure campaigns—Harita couldn’t face the prospect of losing some of its biggest corporate clients were they to buckle under rising consumer pressure.

But the fight isn’t over: Harita still owns the timber concession overlapping Long Isun. The struggle for property rights in Long Isun continues, this time in earnest—but the tide is hopefully turning for good.