Land Clearing for Tobacco Plantations in North Sumatra, 1900s

Photo: Carl Josef Kleingrothe/National Gallery of Australia

Plantations carried out by companies on a large scale will inevitably destroy the forest. Because to get a large plantation area, land clearing must be carried out by cutting down and burning forests. After clearing a large area, they then planted the crops.

The ashes from the burning forest are used as fertilizer to the soil before planting. Rainforests full of biodiversity were replaced with monoculture plantation crops.

The photo above shows a tobacco plantation area in North Sumatra around the 1900s which seems to be still in the land clearing stage. Smoke from the burning of the land can still be seen rising in several places.

You can see a large area of ​​land ready to be planted with tobacco and some plantation infrastructure that is being prepared, such as a storage warehouse which is still in the building framework stage. There is also a convoy of wagons carrying plantation needs.