Siro and Billiton Food Security System during West Monsoon

Siro and Billiton Food Security System during the West Monsoon explores how island communities adapt to seasonal challenges through traditional knowledge, local gastronomy, marine resources, and food preservation. Discover the resilience of Belitong’s food systems and the ancestral wisdom that sustains island life through changing winds and uncertain seas.

When the west monsoon arrives, the sea around Belitong changes character. Strong winds and high waves keep many fishing boats close to shore for weeks at a time, and an island that lives largely from the sea has to find other ways to put food on the table.

Part of the answer has always been inland. Rivers, swamps and the edges of the forest offer their own harvest, and the knowledge of how to gather it is passed down within families rather than written in books. The siro, a traditional fish trap of the same family as the bubu, is one of the quiet tools of that knowledge. Set in the right place at the right moment of the season, it catches fish that cannot be taken with a line. Along the Lenggang river in East Belitong, small fish such as the cempedik come in numbers at the start of the rainy season, and that is when traps like these do their work.

Food security, in this sense, is less a policy than a habit: knowing which season brings which fish, preserving the surplus, as with rusip, the fermented anchovy relish of Bangka Belitung, and keeping a varied kitchen that does not depend on a single source.

As the weather becomes harder to predict, these practices deserve more attention, not less. They are not nostalgia but tested ways of living with a sea that sometimes says no. Writing them down, and asking the people who still practise them, is one small way to make sure they outlast the generation that knows them best.