Strategic roundtable: A Roadmap for Grounding soils in Southeast Asia

Roundtable Convenor(s)

• DD

  Dimas Dwi Laksmana

  Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia
• HN

  Huiying Ng

  Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximillians University, Germany

Roundtable Chair(s)

• DD

  Dimas Dwi Laksmana

  Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia
• HN

  Huiying Ng

  Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximillians University, Germany

Roundtable Participant(s)

• GS

  Gatari Surya Kusuma

  KUNCI Study Forum & Collective and Bakudapan Food Study Group, Struggles for Sovereignty, Seaweed Et cetera, Indonesia
• JE

  Joshua Ezekiel Sales

  Food Today Food Tomorrow, Halo-halo ecologies project, Participatory Food Systems, Philippines
• CM

  Christina Maria Cecilia M. Sayson

  Independent Researcher, Philippines
• AC

  Axel Ceron

  Vrije Universitet Brussel, Young and Early Career Scientists Working Group of International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS),, Belgium
• MW

  Markus Wernli

  Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
• VL

  Vivian Lee

  Independent Researcher
• HT

  Hanjing Toh

  Living Soil, Singapore
• TN

  Thinn Nwe Htwe

  FAO Myanmar National Consultant, Myanmar
• IM

  Ismal Muntaha

  Badan Kajian Pertanahan, Indonesia

Roundtable Abstract: This session follows another session that we organise “Workshop: Grounding soils in Southeast Asia”. Knowledges of and attention to soils have been steadily proliferating from various spaces in academia, policy making, art, activism, and private sector at the global level, including in Southeast Asia. The importance of soils in the region is not limited to its vital role in agriculture, but also in mining, supporting tropical forests, in the conservation of peatlands, and living habitat for microorganisms and invertebrates. As such, on the one hand, soils are becoming an object of renewed attention for the force of emotion with which they shape identities, cultures, memories, histories, and imaginations in the region. On the other, with the rise of investor interest in carbon markets, and scientific interest in carbon sequestration as a strategy for climate change mitigation, soils are set to become a new object of both resource management and exploitation.

This situation raises several key questions for a new era of environmental resource management and ecological relation:
1) what new approaches to monitoring, knowledge sharing, and multi-scalar governance can be shaped, building momentum from successful examples of grassroots action and participatory diplomacy?
2) what is the strength of the cultural work that activists and artists do in creating new cultural forces to renew ecological relations between people and their homes?
3) What forms of exploitation may arise as soil becomes a commodity, which are perceived as threats by those connected to the most vulnerable? How does it compare against land as a commodity?

These questions guide the “Workshop: Grounding soils in Southeast Asia” that precedes this session. In the strategic roundtable, each participant will briefly introduce his/her interests and work on soil, share some of the key discussions, and how they relate to the participants’ practice of doing research, activism, and artistic work on/with soils. We will then invite a discussant to share his/her insights on what have been said.

In the second part, we will delve into the “how” questions. Particularly, we will discuss on how to turn our common points of concern into future collaborations that may take various forms, how to continuously cultivate a space for mutual learning on/with soils in our own localities, what resources we can tap into, what are our timelines, and other practical questions that arise among the participants.