Felines for Food

Fotografer

This photograph was taken in the town of Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali. The story below relates to a journey taken between the volcano at Kintamani and Ubud itself

"A slightly odd title perhaps, but for many Balinese, this is what these carvings represent - their next meal.

Whilst around Ubud, we saw a good number of places selling things like this, but that just represents the tourist end of this particular market. You'd see the occasional small workshop where someone would be carving out a lump of wood; log trapped against a post with their feet as they'd saw away, perhaps to reduce its size down for whatever came next, but at the time it didn't really register what we were seeing - just another local curio in many ways.

It wasn't until we made a trip up to the volcano at Kintamani, and specifically the trip back to Ubud, that the enormity of how a sizeable proportion of the Balinese economy is being run, became clear to us.

At the top of the road back down from Kintamani, we started to see, first, isolated examples of the wood carvers trade being performed in what are no more than open-sided roadside shacks. As the descent progressed though, more and more of these places appeared, maybe two or three crowded together, then a small hamlet with a row for a few dozen yards. After a while though, the wood carvers gave way to those painting up what appeared to be purely souvenirs to us, then the shops and before you know, there seems to be nothing on the road except for outlets selling what must be hundreds of thousands, probably millions of these things; wooden cats, buddhas, mirror tiled pottery, carved items of all shapes and sizes and so on.

After a few miles it dawned on us that what we were witnessing was no more or less than a factory shop floor, but one set in rural Balinese countryside. All these thousands of individual businesses all competing for their own individual slice of trade, but trade with who? There was far too much of it to be going into the tourist market on the island. Talking to our taxi driver quickly revealed that this was all being produced for the export market; the big department chains, garden centres, home furnishing outlets and who knows what other sort of shops. That taxi journey perhaps took 45 minutes to an hour to drive and at an estimate, I would say that for 3/4 of it, we were surrounded by this industry. It was if we'd driven though a bee hive or encountered the Borg, so pervasive was it, the scale of the activity barely comprehensible.

It's very difficult to assess whether what we were seeing was a good or a bad thing. It was clearly contributing to the local economy and bringing in much needed foreign currency to the island. On the other hand though, the conditions in which the people involved were working in were so far below anything anyone reading this is likely to experience, it was way past scary. All I know is that I was stunned and not a little horrified at seeing how the global demand for consumer goods manifests itself on a island as beautiful as Bali."

&n

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