Paris Sembiring

Paris Sembiring, a paddy cab driver turned nursery entrepreneur, has created a business model that empowers and provides economic incentives for people to get involved in seedling development to drive more support of the reforestation movement in Indonesia.

Paris saw a disconnect between attempts to reforest vast expanses of degraded lands in Indonesia and a lack of incentives and know-how among communities in and around those lands to sustain such efforts. After initial campaigns to plant seedlings, the majority of seedlings would wither and die in the hands of families who either did not know how to care for them or had no reason to in the face of pressure to meet their immediate subsistence needs. Paris saw an untapped opportunity for the community to gain economic returns by participating in reforestation efforts while driving greater efficacy in tree survival.

Through Paris’ Tree Bank model, he engages farmers, young people, students, teachers, and scavengers to establish environmental groups to produce high-quality seedlings in a self-sufficient mechanism. Paris involves waste pickers to select quality seeds among waste from juice vendors to supply nearly 400 groups across 10 provinces throughout Sumatra Island. He engages groups of students from kindergarten to university to develop nurseries and serve as proponents of reforestation and other environmental work in their communities. To date, Paris has mobilized more than 16,000 environmental promoters in a movement that is self-sustaining and economically viable to increase forest coverage in degraded tropical forest land. Paris is currently working to spread the model to other islands beyond Sumatra.

Since 1950 rapid rates of deforestation have reduced Indonesia’s tropical forest from 160 million hectares to an estimated 98 million hectares. In spite of this, or perhaps because of comparable trends in other tropical areas, Indonesia possesses the third largest expanse of the world’s remaining tropical forest. However, continued deforestation and land conversion to smallholder or plantation agriculture have put half of Indonesia’s forest in critical degraded condition. People living in rural areas are most affected by the forest degradation. Forest loss reduces watershed areas and makes the flow of clean water to the community more erratic and cycled with floods and drought. During the rainy season, a period that has become increasingly hard to predict, runoff rapidly flows into streams, elevating river levels and subjecting downstream villages, cities, and agricultural fields to flooding. During the dry season, such areas downstream of deforested land can be prone to month-long droughts. These same people affected by deforestation are rarely involved in meaningful ways in the campaigns and environmental efforts aimed at reversing this trend.

Despite considerable public expenditure, government attempts to restore forests are largely ceremonial and have had a low rate of success for increasing forest coverage. Some reasons include the low quality of seedlings produced primarily by government nurseries, poor timing for planting, and lack of any orientation or training for communities and individuals receiving the seedlings to care for the trees. Incorrect tree planting techniques applied by people engaged in reforestation exacerbates the problem, as they do not have the required knowledge and skills to give the seedling a decent chance at survival. Furthermore, there has been an absence of post-planting care. Even though the government has developed 10,000 KBR (Citizen-based Seedling Gardens) throughout Indonesia, through which each group receives a fee to produce 50,000 seedlings per year, most seedlings failed to grow due to incorrect nursery techniques. Attempts like the annual One Billion Trees planting program on degraded land sponsored by the Ministry of Forestry are estimated to have fewer than 10 percent of seedlings survive the year; representing a significant waste of resources. Underlying this failure is more than technical expertise: it is a lack of ownership and tangible economic benefits for families to feel they have a stake in the success of reforestry efforts.

Paris identified a critical gap in reforestation efforts: there was little in it for the people closest to the problem. Communities in degraded areas had little or no contact with the seedlings until they appeared often as a donation from government nurseries, and often of poor quality. They therefore placed little value in the trees or did not know how to care for them, leading to low success rates. To address this, Paris mobilized citizens—regardless of their professions and backgrounds—to engage in a self-sustaining endeavor to develop tree nurseries and lead tree-planting efforts that make economic sense to their families and communities—both in terms of ecology and income. Through the Tree Bank Foundation Paris founded in 2004, he engaged people who live close to the forest, such as farmers and young villagers as well as mobilizing city dwellers like students, teachers, and scavengers to participate in a reforestation movement that now encompasses more than 6,000 tree breeders in ten regencies across Sumatra.

Paris establishes high-quality Tree Banks to serve as training centers for tree breeders. At each center, interested members of the community engage in discussion groups about the benefits of planting trees and the opportunities for developing local nursery businesses. Paris emphasizes the importance of shade and wood trees but promotes 70 percent fruit trees in the tree breeding model, since they bring tangible income to families in a shorter time. Interested people recruit a group of friends to receive hands-on training that goes step-by-step through the methods used to produce quality seedlings and the techniques that will increase their chances to take hold and flourish. These include how to choose seeds, grow saplings from seed and then attach, by budding or grafting, material from trees that are known to be high-quality trees or fruit producers. The environment groups also learn how to plant, for example, by selecting the right time of year for planting the tree, preparing the holes and letting them rest for three days before planting, preparing the seedlings for planting, watering and tree care and maintenance. In addition to seedlings produced for sale, the group members also plant the seedlings in their own yards, in the degraded land near their house, or in the coastal areas, to bring additional income from the sale of fruit and to demonstrate the economic returns of reforesting land to community members; who become their clients. Average group earnings reach approximately $200/day or $6,200/month, turning a 500 percent profit-margin and injecting needed resources into rural communities.

The model centers on a self-perpetuating chain of replication by committing groups to train at least one additional group in the community or vicinity in order to be part of the network of recognized breeders. Each breeder must also agree to donate saplings to the community. To date, 400 groups (approximately 15 people each) trained through the Tree Bank network have established and manage their own nursery businesses in fruit trees, shade trees, or wood trees. To broaden their potential market, the groups organized themselves as an Association of Plant Breeders which serves as a channel to support each other in applying the nursery techniques learned from the trainings. Different types of groups in the network complement one another and those made up of waste pickers serve too as collectors of seeds from juice vendors in urban and peri-urban areas, creating a cost-effective supply of quality fruit tree seeds. Most importantly, through the network of Tree Banks and other nursery groups, the Association of Plant Breeders is able to supply high volume sales to the government for their reforestry programs. Approximately 60 percent of the saplings are sold to the government and 40 percent directly to community members. To date, through Paris’ Tree Bank model, he has succeeded in producing and distributing 30 billion seedlings to communities who know how to care for and benefit from the trees.

Leading with the economic incentives, Paris also uses the nursery groups as focal points to engage the younger generation and schools to embrace and lead reforestation work. He helps them establish Environment Fan Clubs with their own mini nurseries to produce trees that can also be sold and planted in the vicinity of the school. Paris introduced a saving scheme for the environmental group in which students save daily to be able to buy three seedlings to be planted at home. A portion of the fruit trees are planted at the school with revenue from fruit sales sustaining the group’s activities and production of new seedlings. To strengthen the endeavor, teachers have made the activity part of biology class. Paris has also worked with the University of Sumatra Utara to develop an arboretum: 100 percent of the seedlings planted and managed by students have survived and thrived.

In addition to Paris’ Tree Bank Foundation to propagate tree breeder groups, he also founded a citizen organization, Indonesia Environmental Care Foundation, whose role is to monitor the environmental degradation across Sumatra, extending out from the communities where the tree breeders operate. The aim is to promote the creation of environmental awareness groups to serve as advocates to promote and motivate community members to participate in the tree planting movement of seedlings donated by the Tree Bank Nursery groups.

Paris is currently in the process of expanding his model beyond Sumatra with the goal of setting up the Tree Bank Nursery model in every district across the thirty-three provinces in Indonesia.

Paris was born into a farming family in 1958 in North Sumatra. He grew up with seven siblings and his parents continually reinforced the importance of giving to others. Due to economic difficulties, young Paris helped his family by selling ice cream from the age of eight. He also sold coconut drinks at his school. Though he graduated from primary school and continued to junior high, due to financial constraints, Paris was forced to dropout of school. As a teenager, he wandered and worked various jobs as a laborer, newspaper delivery boy, and farmer, among other things. Paris moved around and took advantage of the work opportunities he could find, but his luck ran out, and he found himself homeless and sleeping by the road; a moment he will never forget.

At 18, Paris worked as a paddy cab driver. He always found shelter from sun and rain under a shady mahogany tree. While waiting for passengers, Paris picked the fallen mahogany fruits and brought them home to plant. He shared the seedlings with his neighbors. Over time Paris added to his seedlings with a Shorea tree, a valuable timber species, and later a banyan tree, which could grow in rocky land. Paris picked the seeds from the neighboring woods.

Two years later, Paris suffered from an accident in his paddy cab, and at the same time, the government banned the activity in his city, so he left that line of work. However, he continued with his seedlings in the back yard of his rented house by opening a stall to sell them. Paris relocated to his family’s farm when he married but continued to pick and grow seeds. He developed his nursery idea and established a for-profit company, CV Paris Garden, to focus on developing his nursery business in various timber and fruit trees. Paris had also been growing distinctive species for conservation and traditional herbal medicine, but continued to share with others how they too could grow their own seedlings. When his nursery business grew and turned a healthy profit he started to teach others to follow his path. Paris believed in trees as the breath of human life, not only because they preserved the land that he farmed but also because their fruit and valued wood served as an important economic investment.

In 2003 Paris was awarded the prestigious Kalpataru Award from the government for his dedication to conserve the environment and teach other people like him, from humble backgrounds, how to capture value through tree planting. Paris realized that there was a great demand for this work and many more families could benefit, beyond those he trained as a side activity to his company. In 2004 Paris established Yayasan Bank Pohon (Tree Bank Foundation), and launched his Tree Bank idea as a social movement in reforestation. Through his work Paris has succeeded in cultivating a second and even third generation of breeders who share his commitment to breathe new life into a degraded environment. A number of breeders trained through Paris’ work have gone on to receive the Kalpataru Award, a testament to Paris’ commitment to spread change through others.