PALEMBANG, Indonesia – The pempek restaurants in the Plaju neighborood were full to the gills in early March. Palembang chefs pulverized mudfish caught from the Musi River into subtle variations of the historic city’s specialty fish cake.

“They’re sold all year, but there are more buyers during the fasting month,” Plaju resident Nining told Mongabay Indonesia, referring to the mudfish, or snakehead murrel (Channa striata).

With the fasting month of Ramadan underway, pempek traders like Nining, 37, grafted harder than usual, in the foreground of the oil refinery and riverport estate operated by state energy company Pertamina next door.

The Sumatran city of Palembang was home to the Srivijaya Empire from the seventh to 11th centuries, and an important springboard for the reach of Buddhism into Indonesia by Chinese monks.

The kingdom’s rulers maintained a vital maritime Silk Road staging post on the Musi River, which today runs through the city of a 1.8 million people before emptying out into the Java Sea.

The people of Palembang and in rural South Sumatra have turned to the wetlands and rivers here as the source of food for centuries.

In addition to Palembang’s pempek fishcake, culinary heritage in the capital of Indonesia’s South Sumatra province comprises a medley of celimpungan — a soup with tekwan fish balls — laksan, lenggang, and other fish-based dishes traditionally made with sago.

Locally refined palm sugar has historically been used to make the base for pempek, while coconut milk is a key ingredient in the bases for laksan and celimpungan.

“The wetlands are an important aspect of the culture of the people of South Sumatra,” said Ryllian Chandra, who researches hydrology and water policy at Raden Fatah State Islamic University in Palembang.

Perishable goods

Transformation of much of Sumatra’s ancient peatlands in just a few decades — from untouched old-growth forest to the backyard of extractive and plantation industries — threatens erasure of Indigenous cultures on Indonesia’s largest island.

In South Sumatra, a province the size of Portugal, industrial landscape change has cut almost half the tree cover in the two decades to 2023.

The Musi River begins in Sumatra’s mountainous spine, the Barisan range, and winds around 750 kilometers (466 miles) through Palembang into the inlet separating Sumatra from Bangka Island.

The wetlands around the Musi River cover an area of around 30,000 square kilometers (11,600 square miles). Based on data from the Hutan Kita Institute, a civil society organization, more than a third of this wetland has been repurposed by extractive and plantation firms.

Large companies, including Pertamina and plantation giant Wilmar International, line the riverbanks and use the river as a shipping route, as the Palembang-based Srivijaya Empire did a millennium earlier.

A new wave of oil extraction flourished in the wetlands after local people took over the wells left vacant by the Standard Vacuum Oil Company in the 1980s. Plantation firms have uprooted sago forests for the monocultures supplying international consumer companies with palm oil, pulp and paper. Miners working upriver in the Musi are dumping pollution in the river.

Factory activity, expansion of human settlements, and road construction over riverbeds, swamps and lakes have also worsened sediment in the river, which increases that water’s opacity and diminishes photosynthesis. This sediment jams fish gills and injures prospects for spawning.

Some here worry the damage to the landscape outside Palembang threatens the city’s culinary heritage, and that environmental factors may already be feeding into prices.

In February, Indonesia recorded consumer price deflation for the first time in more than 20 years, after President Prabowo Subianto increased electricity subsidies. However, food prices in February still rose by 2.3% compared with a year earlier, despite improved growing conditions compared with last year’s drought.

Breaking the day’s fast at the end of the day in March was certain to become more expensive. Indonesia’s chief statistician, Amalia Adininggar Widyasanti, said prices always responded to higher demand during the holy month.

Snakehead gang

Data from the local government show the city gets through around 2 tons of snakehead murrel every day, much of which is minced into pempek and takwan and other recipes that form part of Palembang’s history and identity.

During Ramadan, the demand for the fish surges, and traders like Nining and 48-year-old Utami Dewi find restaurants packed out after sunset as the city’s Muslim population breaks the daily fast.

“During the rainy season like now, a lot of gabus is brought in from elsewhere,” Utami Dewi, 48, said, using the local name for the snakehead murrel.

Utami said prices spike from around 30,000 rupiah ($1.80) per kilo during Ramadan as the fasting month culminates in the Idul Fitri holiday.

“It can reach 100,000 rupiah [$6],” she told Mongabay Indonesia.

Some here worry that the seasonal demand-pull inflation on food staples during Ramadan could worsen as environmental change introduces new supply problems.

“Since the late 1990s, the price of sago flour has continued to go up, so we use tapioca,” said 81-year-old Plaju resident Muryati.

Murrel of the story

In 2019 researchers set out to sequence the DNA of snakehead murrel collected in South Sumatra.

“Overfishing and habitat fragmentation due to pollution, illegal logging, and land conversion conduce a decline in this fish population in its habitat,” the researchers noted.

Snakehead fishers in the Mekong Delta, which provides a majority of protein intake for 60 million people in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, face urgent challenges owing to increased salinity and changes to rainfall brought on my climate change.

“These drivers of change will be felt throughout the fish value chain and will pose significant challenges for fisheries and aquaculture production; food security and the nutrition and health of people,” researchers from Cambodia, Vietnam and the U.S. noted in one study published more than a decade ago.

Some in civil society say local administrations in South Sumatra are enthusiastic supporters of local aquaculture industries, but are failing to arrest developments threatening freshwater fish like snakehead.

A government program has tried to affordably farm the snakehead in Ogan Komering Ulu district. However, Ryllian, the professor, said the snakehead is a glutton, and that ammonia pollution from fish feed can contaminate water courses, as has occurred in Lake Maninjau in West Sumatra and Lake Batur in Bali.

Farming tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) and catfish (Clarias gariepinus) in artificial ponds has become policy mainstream, rather than strategic efforts to bolster numbers of freshwater fish in the Musi River.

Scholarship of the maritime Srivijaya Empire is limited because archaeology has likely been washed away by river currents, or lost beneath layers of sediment in Palembang. In recent years Palembang’s fishers have been finding priceless Srivijaya artifacts in addition to catching the snakeheads feeding the city’s contemporary culture. Anxiety persists that the presence of freshwater fish may dwindle, much like the forests that grew here for centuries.

“If the wetlands are damaged and destroyed,” Ryllian said, “then there’s the possibility these won’t exist anymore.”

Banner image: The Sumatran belida fish is a protected species that is increasingly difficult to find in the wetlands of the Musi River, South Sumatra. Image by Nopri Ismi/Mongabay Indonesia.

This story was first published here in Indonesian on March 8, 2025.

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Citations:

Arisuryanti, T., Agiestina, P., Fajar, I., & Firdaus, N. U. (2020). 16S mitochondrial sequence characterization of striped snakehead (Channa striata Bloch, 1793) from Ogan River, South Sumatra. AIP Conference Proceedings, 2260, 020002. doi:10.1063/5.0015906

Navy, H., Minh, T. H., & Pomeroy, R. (2016). Impacts of climate change on snakehead fish value chains in the Lower Mekong Basin of Cambodia and Vietnam. Aquaculture Economics & Management, 21(2), 261-282. doi:10.1080/13657305.2016.1185196