The first thing that strikes you when you walk along the coastline adjacent to Batu Belubang, a village on Bangka, a large island off the southeastern coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, is the colour of the Java Sea. Rather than the tropical azure blue you would expect, the water is brown and cloudy, polluted by sand pumped up from the sea floor. ‘Look in the distance,’ says Uday Ratno, who works for WALHI, Indonesia’s largest and oldest environmental-advocacy NGO, gesturing at a vast armada of rickety boats and rafts. ‘All these rafts are digging the seabed for tin. In an hour of drilling, they can dump up to 200 cubic metres of sand.’
How many were there that day? The number is difficult to calculate as they’re scattered as far as the eye could see. The makeshift rafts, built from bamboo and recycled material, carry up to three miners. Hacan, 33, spends ten hours a day at sea amid the din of the pumps that suck up the sand. ‘This area is known as the Beach of a Thousand Rafts,’ he says. ‘It is very rich in tin. Every day I extract up to ten kilos.’
He can sell his daily haul for the equivalent of £45. Tin is a commodity in great demand – every smartphone contains a few grams and it’s used as solder in many other electrical goods. Indonesia is the world’s second-largest tin producer after China, and 90 per cent of that comes from Bangka and its sister island, Belitung.
The islands produce more than 80,000 tonnes annually. Since the early 18th century, Bangka’s rich alluvial deposits of the tin oxide cassiterite have been exploited. A long, boot-shaped belt of the deposits stretches from Myanmar through Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, with Bangka being the toe.
The island’s population in the 2020 census was 1,146,581, and more than 60 per cent of the local economy depends on tin mining.
The island’s 45,000 fishers are exasperated with the mining industry. In the village of Matras, the fishing sheds are decorated with placards used during demonstrations in front of the governor’s palace to demand a halt to mining and protection of the coastline. ‘The fish production has dropped sharply,’ says Darman, 58, who has spent 34 years at sea. ‘Before, here, I could catch several dozen kilos of squid and mackerel. Now I can barely catch two kilos. I have to go further from the coast, but it costs me more in fuel.’
Squatting in his boat, Yaman, 40, is preparing his gear for the night’s fishing trip. For years, he has seen the ravages of drilling on the underwater environment. He tells us: ‘Some species of fish have disappeared from our coasts. Why are the authorities waiting to act? The mines are destroying our resources and our way of life.’
He says that he’s ready to ‘fight to the bitter end’ to get ‘the local government to intervene’. ‘We hope they will ban new concessions,’ he says. ‘They must understand that our trade is in danger and that it must be protected. The mines must disappear.’