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When Illinois Tech Professor of Social Sciences Yuri Mansury was awarded a Fulbright Scholar Award to study how to transform agricultural practices in his native Indonesia, the project he envisioned was more than just academic—it was deeply personal.

Though he has spent much of his life in the United States, Mansury felt a pull to make a difference in his home country.

“I’m ethnically Indonesian. I was born and raised in Indonesia,” says Mansury. “I got my bachelor’s in engineering in Indonesia. But when I got my degree, I decided that I wanted to do something different….I became obsessed with the problem of poverty in Indonesia. I decided what I wanted to do is find solutions to help solve the poverty problem among my countrypeople.”

Most studies investigating deforestation in Indonesia have focused on its outer islands such as Borneo, Sumatra, and others. Java—the most populated island in the world and home to more than half of Indonesia’s more than 280 million people—was often ignored.

While venturing to some of the most rural areas of Java, Mansury sought to get answers to two questions.

1. Why do Javanese farmers still practice slash-and-burn agriculture, which involves cutting down and burning existing trees, brush, and foliage to clear land?

2. What can be done to change the mindset of Javanese farmers to shift to more sustainable practices?

With those questions in hand, Mansury conducted a pilot study in summer 2023 to test his approach and build connections. During his pilot study, the scope of poverty in rural Java became apparent.

“Half of the population in that area still live below the poverty line,” says Mansury. “We know that poverty contributes in important ways to deforestation. People don’t have a choice except to go into the forest and do the best they can.”

Returning to rural Java a year later for the main portion of his research in 2024, Mansury’s Fulbright fieldwork spanned six months. His time was largely split between Jakarta—where he spent much of his time preparing surveys and analyzing data at his host university Universitas Pertamina—and field visits to remote, forest-edge villages.

“Every day was different,” Mansury says of his time in the field. “In March, it was Ramadan, the fasting month in Indonesia. It was precisely during that time when I conducted face-to-face interviews. I was always introduced as an American scholar—I definitely felt very privileged to have the opportunity to talk to them.”

While Mansury was able to conduct surveys and interviews in 10 villages while he was in Java, there were multiple towns that he was unable reach due to nearly impassible roads. That lack of infrastructure highlighted one of Mansury’s biggest challenges, but also alluded to the challenges that rural Indonesian farmers face if they want to transition to more sustainable farming practices.

Mansury’s findings paint a stark picture of the adversity rural farmers face in Java. Many people in the region live below the poverty line—they make only about $1 per day. Therefore, slash-and-burn methods that are quick, cheap, and require no special skills are often the most obvious option.

Sustainable alternatives such as growing organic fruits and vegetables demand upfront investment, knowledge, and access to bigger but more distant markets such as Jakarta.

“Slash and burn is easy—there’s a reason why people still practice it,” says Mansury. “If you shift into something such as organic fruit, it can take longer—several years—for the first harvest. Without access to capital, they wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves, let alone invest in more sustainable methods.”

Adding to these difficulties, farmers often face predatory lending practices just to make it to their next harvest. In order to survive until then, farmers are often forced to take out loans, only to then have most of their crop claimed by lenders.

For Mansury, other barriers—including cultural ones—also emerged, making his fieldwork tougher. Because the region in Java that he was studying was very conservative, many women were not comfortable interviewing with Mansury—nearly 80 percent of his respondents were men. Access to villages also remained a consistent issue, and the barriers that made Mansury’s fieldwork difficult are the very same ones that often keep farmers locked into cycles of poverty and relying on predatory loans.

Despite the challenges, however, Mansury remains hopeful.

He aims to publish a paper about his Fulbright fieldwork within the next year. By sharing his findings, he hopes to find people who can help these forest communities make the transformations necessary to shift to more sustainable practices.

“I was able to do something meaningful for these people whose voice is not always heard,” says Mansury. “This Fulbright allowed me to fulfil that ambition, to give back to the people of my home country of Indonesia, to help them identify the challenges that have prevented them from reaching a better life.”