News stories by Kanis Dursin, page 2

JAKARTA, Mar 31 (IPS) - Fifty-two-year-old farmer Theresia Loda was effusive when asked how conservation agriculture has changed her economic situation.

JAKARTA, Mar 14 (IPS) - The Indonesian government is tapping children as advocates against child marriage in this Southeast Asian country where over 340,000 girls get married before they reach 18 years old every year.

JAKARTA, Oct 10 (IPS) - A regional agreement on managing transboundary haze caused by fires raging in Indonesia's forests and peatlands appears all but buried in the embers of frustration of its neighbouring countries.

SUBANG, Indonesia, Jun 24 (IPS) - When 45-year-old Kaswati joined an income-generating project in her village in Indonesia's West Java province in 1999, all she hoped to do was supplement her family's income at a time of erratic harvests.

JAKARTA, Mar 29 (IPS) - Last October, at the beginning of Indonesia's rainy season, a 37-year-old farmer named Herinurdin took a leap of faith. Instead of planting corn in his entire 1.3-hectare rainfed farm in the Sukabumi town of West Java, as his family had done for generations, he sowed 1,600 square metres worth of rice instead.

JAKARTA, Nov 29 (IPS) - At the age of 82, former Indonesian political detainee Mudjayin wonders if he will ever see justice served.

Misradi, a 58-year-old farmer from the Jelok neighborhood in Pacitan, East Java, some 524 kilometres east of Jakarta, has found a way to reduce his monthly expenses by 30 percent: instead of buying produce from the local market, he and his family now harvest most of their vegetables from their own yard.

Clutching a plastic bag containing a tree sapling in his right hand and a slim notebook in his left, 11-year-old Rizki Fauzi is the picture of a young climate change expert.

Dreams of sending his children to quality schools have vanished for 40-year-old farmer Muslikin, as the father of three now struggles to repay the bank loan he took out to finance his jatropha plantation in 2006.

Irman Meilandi unhesitatingly attributes the return of birds, wildlife and the forests around his hilly village of Mandalamekar in West Java province to conservation advice streaming in over community radio.