Samadua's Nutmeg, Beutong Ateuh's Candlenut, and the Shadow of Expanding Mining Frontiers in Aceh

Samadua – A Subdistrict Built on the Scent of Nutmeg

 South Aceh is often called the heart of Indonesia’s nutmeg production. This is not rhetoric. For more than a century, household economies along the western Bukit Barisan, from Meukek, Sawang, and Samadua to Tapaktuan, have depended on nutmeg trees planted in mixed gardens alongside durian, clove, patchouli, chili, and jengkol. These gardens are not monocultures. They are agroforestry systems that ecologically mimic the structure of secondary forest, store water, protect soil from erosion, and support biodiversity that will never appear in conventional economic accounts.

The Samadua nutmeg economy is a textbook example of what the agrarian literature calls smallholder resilience. Farming families have great harvesting flexibility. Nutmeg can be picked year-round and sold as mace, seed, or fruit flesh for candied preserves; market risk is spread out; and productive assets can be passed across generations without being divided into worthless fragments. This system was not a gift from the state. Farmers built it, with knowledge handed down and renewed from one generation to the next, season after season. Even when white root rot (Rigidoporus microporus) struck nutmeg gardens in the past decade, the community’s response, supported by the Aceh Nutmeg Forum, led to the recovery of hundreds of hectares of smallholder gardens and to a more disease-resistant improved variety, “Sambutan.” This is a community able to look after itself, so long as its living space is not taken from under its feet.

This is where mining becomes dangerous. According to reporting by the Aceh Civil Society Coalition, two companies hold exploration IUPs in the Samadua area, totaling about 1,491.4 hectares: PT Bersama Sukses Mining (PT BSM) with 752.4 hectares and PT Mineral Mega Sentosa (PT MMS) with 739 hectares. The figure looks modest on paper, but projected onto maps of villages and smallholder gardens, it becomes a threat to water sources, to slope fertility, and to the ecological connection between nutmeg gardens and the forest stands on hilltops that hold back rainwater.

Even more troubling is the permitting process itself. In an open “love letter” issued by the Samadua Student Association (IMPS) on the 69th anniversary of South Aceh in November 2025, it is clear that residents experienced what is technically called procedural dispossession: their inherited land was placed on the Mining Business License Area (WIUP) map without outreach, without the knowledge of landowners, and without meaningful consultation. When the principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is reduced to a perfunctory signature or skipped entirely, the permit that results is no longer an instrument of spatial planning. It becomes what the Aceh Civil Society Coalition called “a blank check for companies to enter and take control of people’s living space.”

On the night of Saturday, 15 August 2026, after the Isya prayer, hundreds of Samadua residents signed a petition against the mine at the Al-Munawarah Mosque in Gampong Kota Baru. A similar action had earlier been held by the Samadua South Aceh Kinship Association (IKSAS) in Subulussalam. This was not an impulsive act but a collective decision by a community that had carefully weighed how great the risk of losing water sources from the hills around their gardens would be, how long mining compensation could make up for lost in nutmeg income across generations, and how many agrarian conflicts would flare if the permits were forced through.

Beutong Ateuh – Candlenut, Rivers, and a Bloody History

About two hundred kilometers to the north, in the highlands of Nagan Raya, Beutong Ateuh Banggalang occupies a geographic position that may be even more ecologically strategic. The least populous subdistrict in Nagan Raya (about 2,026 people according to the latest data), it sits at roughly 556 meters above sea level, at the meeting point of two of Sumatra’s most important ecosystem landscapes: the Leuser Ecosystem (KEL) and the Ulu Masen Ecosystem. Beutong Ateuh’s forests are a living bridge, a corridor, between the two landscapes, allowing large wildlife such as orangutans, tigers, and Sumatran elephants to move, interbreed, and survive.

On the slopes of that corridor grows what Acehnese and Gayo people call kemili, alongside Robusta coffee. According to mapping by Syiah Kuala University, the land area for both covers 4,379 hectares, more than 61% of the potential coffee plantation area of Nagan Raya Regency. Together with paddy rice, areca nut, cacao, and durian, these commodities form a livelihood system as old, and as moral, as the Samadua nutmeg system.

But this landscape carries wounds. In Aceh’s contemporary history, the name Beutong Ateuh is tied to two events that must not be overlooked. The first is the 1999 human tragedy, when armed violence took the lives of Teungku Bantaqiah and dozens of his students, an event that made this land, in collective memory, tanoh (land) of the martyrs. The second, more recent, is the flash flood and landslide of 26 November 2025, which destroyed at least 200 homes and nearly erased Kuta Teungoh Village from the map. The Meureubo River, which rises in the Leuser forest and empties into the Indian Ocean, overflowed with an intensity not recorded in even the oldest residents’ memory. Months after the disaster, residents are still living in temporary shelters, and to this day the clean water crisis has not fully recovered.

It is in this context that the metal mineral mining permit regime has been reactivated. Through Decree of the Head of the Aceh Investment and One-Stop Integrated Services Agency No. 540/DPMPTSP/05/IUP-Eks./2026, PT Alam Cempaka Wangi (ACW) obtained an Exploration IUP for metal minerals (copper) in Beutong Ateuh Banggalang covering 1,820 hectares. PT Hasil Bumi Sembada (HBS) also holds an exploration permit. Taken together, the eight companies holding IUPs in Nagan Raya, including CV Blang Leumak Raya, PT Hikmah Beutong Raya, PT Mozika Karian Meutuah, PT Nagan Mineral Murni, and two coal companies, point to one thing: the state is viewing this landscape not as an ecological buffer but as a mineral reserve waiting to be extracted.

What makes this configuration ethically and legally problematic is the existence of Supreme Court Decision No. 91.K/TUN/LH/2020. That decision revoked the permit of PT Emas Mineral Murni (PT EMM) over a 10,000-hectare concession in Beutong Ateuh, on the grounds that the concession could damage the Leuser Ecosystem and environmental functions, and that it lay in an area prone to floods, landslides, drought, and earthquakes of VII–XII on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. In other words, the decision is a legal instrument that positions Beutong Ateuh as an area that should be free of any extractive activity. The reappearance of new IUPs after that ruling violates the spirit of the law set by Indonesia’s highest court.

The Permit Regime as Structural Violence

Let us pause to reflect on what is actually happening. When a mining business permit is issued without FPIC, without meaningful consultation, and without mapping its overlap with people’s productive land, what is taking place is not mere administrative negligence but a form of structural violence: violence that works through procedure, through stamps and signatures, through maps drawn in comfortable rooms hundreds of kilometers from the gardens where nutmeg and candlenut trees grow.

This violence operates on several levels at once. At the first level, it delegitimizes people’s rights over their own land, which has been managed for generations but which, in the eyes of the permit regime, lacks a “formal certificate.” At the second level, it alters power relations within the community: some residents, promised jobs or financial rewards, support the mine, while most oppose it. This creates horizontal conflict that did not previously exist, and companies often exploit it to justify claims that “the local community supports” the project. At the third level, it hands long-term risks such as hydrological damage, heavy metal contamination, and further deforestation to the communities least able to bear them, while profits are siphoned off to centers of capital far beyond Aceh’s borders.

In contemporary political-ecological analysis, this configuration is not an anomaly but a pattern. It recurs in Halmahera, in Southeast Sulawesi, in Central Kalimantan, wherever the extractive frontier pushes into areas previously regarded as “peripheral.” What makes the Aceh case especially urgent is the Leuser Ecosystem, the only place in the world where orangutans, tigers, elephants, and Sumatran rhinos still share a single landscape, a biogeographic fact that makes any decision to allow mining in its buffer zone a decision with consequences beyond the jurisdiction of the Republic of Indonesia.

Aceh’s Nature Is Not a Legacy to Be Used Up

When we place Samadua and Beutong Ateuh side by side, we see more than two mining conflicts. We see a historic choice facing Aceh: will this landscape be managed as an ecological buffer and a stage for a sustainable smallholder spice economy, or will it be handed over to an extractive regime that has repeatedly proven it leaves behind holes, mud, and wounds?

That choice is not hypothetical. It is being made today, through every IUP issued, every WIUP map drawn, every consultation skipped, and every resident’s voice left unheard. Yayasan APEL Green Aceh, Selamatkan Hutan Hujan, Yes to Life No to Mining, Pawang Uteun, Lanskap Hijau Sumatera, and the entire civil society network state their position clearly: (1) a comprehensive evaluation of all IUPs in Samadua and Beutong Ateuh; (2) full application of the FPIC principle; (3) public disclosure of permitting information; and (4) a halt to mining activities that could trigger agrarian conflict and environmental damage until land rights, community participation, and ecological impacts are resolved openly.

Samadua’s nutmeg has fed families for more than a hundred years. Beutong Ateuh’s candlenut has grown alongside Aceh’s long history of resistance. The rivers flowing from both areas give life to millions of people downstream. The November 2025 disaster has warned us what happens when this landscape is weakened. The 2020 Supreme Court decision has declared what legally must not be done. The voices from the villages have said plainly what they want. What remains is for the state to find the courage to listen. Aceh’s nature is not a legacy to be used up.

Yayasan APEL Green Aceh, for the forests, water, and living space of the people of Aceh.