Women Farmers as Entrepreneur in the Sebatik-Nunukan Border, North Kalimantan Province

Policies in the economic and development sector still place men as the main actors, women only as “task assistants” in economic activities. The women of Liang Bunyu village in West Sebatik District make Seaweed farming a source of household income and become a leading commodity in village economic development. The women in the village bind seaweed farming for the nursery. A job that men are reluctant to do, but the most important part of the production process. This paper discussed how Sebatik women play a crucial role in making seaweed cultivation a household business. It will be an essential input for the local government policy of developing a household business driven by housewives. The research method used was a qualitative description with an ethnographic approach to make participant observations and in-depth interviews are accurate in collecting data and field findings. The research found that Sebatik women had the prospect to be an entrepreneur. It's just that Sebatik's economic development does not necessarily increase women's empowerment. Not many Sebatik women farmers think about selling seaweed as a processed product, which is more economically valuable and profitable. Education and community culture were the main causes, even though kinship and ethnic networks could function as economic capital. Sebatik woman farmers need government support in both policy regulation and practical assistance, especially in entrepreneurial training.


A. Introduction
Sebatik Island is the gateway to economic and trade activities on the border of North Kalimantan, which relies on the agriculture, plantation, fishery, livestock, and tourism sector (Rudiatin, 2018b). The border market is an entity that does not only dynamize the economy and supports the economy at the border by bringing together sellers and buyers, but has a much more complex function, namely maintaining and support to the socio-cultural dynamics of the people on the borderland (Suwartiningsih, Samiyono, & Purnomo, 2018;Sugiarti, 2016;Sri Rahayu, Irwan and Ariesta, 2019). In the Regional Medium Term Development Plan of Nunukan Regency, National Medium Term Development Plan --regulation of the head of the national agency for border acceleration -Number 2 of 2015, and the Regional Medium Term Development Plan of North Kalimantan Province, the development of Sebatik Island will become a priority development agenda for 2017-2021 what will make Sebatik Island a New Economic Growth Area. Especially the Center for Agribusiness-Based Economic Growth, then Sebatik Island will also become a National Strategic Area in Agribusiness and Agro tourism.
In Sebatik, seaweed is currently one of the alternative foods for aquatic foods, they are rich in nutrients and have prospects for development. In the last five years, seaweed cultivation has supported the economy of the Sebatik community, one of which is the village community of Liang Bunyu. Seaweed cultivation is a home-based business that increases household income. Before the Covid-19 pandemic era, this business opened up more job opportunities with the increasing number of seaweed cultivation entrepreneurs. The most needed job is "mabbettang" which means tying seaweed. Tying seaweed is many done by women, especially mothers who need additional income. While the work as a binder of seaweed does not move from morning to evening.
Men are rarely this work. They prefer other jobs that require more energy and thought, such as trawling seaweed that grows on the seabed.
In addition to fishing, they will also get seaweed. The seaweed falls from the seaweed nursery and plants on the seabed. Most of the fish trawlers are now turning their concentration into seaweed trawlers.
The enormous potential and economic opportunities created since the development of the seaweed cultivation business in Sebatik Nunukan have caused almost all coastal communities who initially worked as fishing fishermen to switch to seaweed cultivation. Women also do not need to work outside the home too far. During recess, they can return home, take care of the family lunch. In the seaweed nursery season, women can work all day tying seaweed. It is undeniable that the development of seaweed cultivation in Sebatik is largely the contribution of the women of Sebatik. However, the businesses that these women run are joint ventures with their husbands.
Policies in the economic and development sector have so far placed men as the maitors, even though in Sebatik, women are the backbone of trade between the Sebatik-Tawau region (Rudiatin, 2018b). Women are the main actors in the production and distribution of agricultural commodities, but government policies still place women only as task assistants in agribusiness economic activities (Rosaldo & Lamphere, 1974;Arsal, Basri, & Tono, 2017;Herawati, 2016). This policy adopts a patrimonial system, which is a system used in Malay society in general, where the male or husband's family is more responsible for family interests than the woman or wife. The main task of women is to maintain and manage the household or do light work in the family (Iswanto, 2019). The same thing happened in Padang Lawas where the patriarchal kinship system caused women to do all family economic activities that should be the responsibility of man, without having the opportunity to self-actualize in these economic activities (Harahap, 2020).
How are women entrepreneurial in increasing household income and the economy of the Sebatik sub-district? This paper is an attempt to describe the condition of women in seaweed farming who have started entrepreneurship in processing certain products that have always been a commodity supplied from Tawau. The local government of Nunukan also believes that increasing the entrepreneurship of women farmers has implications for improving household welfare. For many years, Sebatik has been flooding with processed agricultural products such as biscuits from taro, nuts, chocolate, banana chips, then lunkhead and confectionery from Tawau. The new policy from the Malaysian and Indonesian governments -resulting in a change in trade crossings from Sebatik directly to Tawau, starting in 2013 to go through Nunukan -, does not reduce the flood of processed food in shops and the supermarket (Kebalen Jaya, the only supermarket in Sebatik). The cross-border trade pattern after the PLB revocation does not automatically recover until 2018 (Setiawaty, 2018;Rudiatin, Sumarni, & Ramadhan, 2020). But on March 18 in 2020, Malaysia imposed a movement control order (MCO) when the coronavirus (Covid-19) cases in the country began to increase sharply. Until now the country's borders are still closed to tourists and border crossers. Malaysian security forces have banned ships from Aji Kuning and Sungai Melayu into the domestic port of Tawau. After a year of the covid-19 pandemic has passed, the scarcity of goods in Sebatik is starting to be felt. Residents of Sebatik began to wake up from sleep.
How can the entrepreneurial prospects of women farmers starting to emerge in Sebatik be developed as a target to break total dependence on the procurement of goods from Tawau, mostly processed food to household needs? interviews, observation and documentation. Researchers are very dynamically able to make various adjustments to strategies and techniques to get more information needed.

Ethnography
Collecting data were from Liang Bunyu village, West Sebatik subdistrict, Nunukan District, North Kalimantan province, which borders Sabah, Malaysia. The focus applied in this research is the crucial role of women in the seaweed business, whether as entrepreneurs or as bonding laborers (trawlers). According to Frankham (Somekh & Lewin, 2011), ethnography is a methodological feature of anthropology in which researchers conduct observations and interviews, and become part of a group of people to understand the culture of the society he studied. Observation, as the name implies, is a way of collecting data through observing.

Informant
For Crapo (2002), an informant is a person who speaks in his dialect, a native speaker, while a respondent is a person who answers a Social network analysis is in various fields of science. Historically, it has closed to sociology, psychology, mathematics, anthropology, and network science. From the outset, the network approach to the study of behavior has involved two commitments: (1) it is guided by formal theory organized in mathematical terms, and (2)  informant and conduct in-depth interviews. And then the researcher will be able to identify his group of friends, kinship and more broadly, to obtain accurate information and at the same time be able to cross-check data among the informants (Wellman, 1988;Knoke & Kuklinski, 1991;Crossley, 2010;Scott, 2011).

Analysis and Validity
The researcher checked the members of the informants throughout the interview. Continuously Information checking is a contribution to the reliability of the data. Finally, the researcher conducted a post-checking interview with each participant to confirm the interpretation of the data. If the same theme emerges from several participants, then the data is called credible and trustworthy. The researcher is the main instrument and is a crucial part of the process of any qualitative research (Patton, 2003). To build trustworthiness (trust) and credibility, researchers use triangulation.
Triangulation controls bias and constructs valid propositions because traditional scientific techniques are no longer compatible with these alternative epistemologies.
Fetterman (2019)  The area of 1,799 H occupied by a population of around 1,900 people is an opportunity for a demographic bonus for the resident of Liyang Bunyu. Rich with natural potential, they must have skills that can cultivate land with an area that is almost the same as the population.
Demographic bonus and has grown in size in recent decades must be a In Liang Bunyu Village, many women afterward completing their household work will go with their husbands to the garden or "Bagang" by the sea where the seaweed nursery settled. They work from morning until the sun goes down, especially when the nursery season comes or the planting season. Women tie seaweed, and men so haul fish and seaweed that grow on the seabed. Those who own seaweed cultivation land will become the foreman of workers, while those who do not own land for daily tie labor. When the seaweed breeding season is over, they return to the "Palawija" fields or oil palm plantations. The division of work is the same, those who do not own land become laborers, while the landowners pay wages.
Mrs. Rita is a seaweed entrepreneur whose business has been running for about five years. She supervises about 200 women farmers in Liyang Bunyu Village. The workers tied seaweed seeds to bottles of mineral water which are connected by a plastic rope that is about 1 to 2.5 meters long. The bottles filled with seaweed will float on the seawater, becoming a breeding ground for the seaweed. The place where the seaweed grows has the same function as the fish farming area on the seafront. It is called "Bagang", and each of these lands has an owner. They work full-time from 7.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. with an income of 75 to 150 thousand rupiahs every day. The size of their income depends on how many meters of seaweed seeds they have worked. Their working-age varies widely, from 15 to 55 years old.

Source: Authors
Seaweed cultivation is done using a longline system, a stretched rope that is about 25 meters long with an installation distance of 50 cm between the stretch ropes and the distance between the attachment points of the seaweed seeds is about 15 centimeters. One cultivator generally has about 400-5,000 stretch ropes, of which 1 ha of water area installed about 800 stretch ropes. One stretch can produce 13-15 kilograms of dry seaweed during the peak season, and about 5 kg of dry seaweed when the growing season conditions are not good. The maintenance period for seaweed is about 45 days per cropping cycle. At high production, it would take 50 days.
Seaweed can give better economic value when women can process it into a variety of ready-to-eat foods. Some women are so smart, Nurhani and her group, collect the seaweed that is not worth selling for processed food. They will turn it into jelly, sweets, and lunkhead. Some turn it into ready-to-eat foods such as seaweed soup and seaweed ice. Of course, if they put more effort into the process, it can become a household industry with economic value. Unfortunately, most of these women prefer receiving wages for tying seaweed. This choice is closely related to the rank of education, where education services are not yet optimal, which is also a common problem in border areas (Rahman, Mawar, Wahyuning Dyas Tuti, Handayani, & Sahrul, 2021).  advantages, namely that apart from being able to catch fish, they can also catch seaweed, both of which have good prospects in the export market.
The exporters are from Surabaya, the seaweed packaged and then exported. Unfortunately, seaweed farmers, including the women, are fixated on pursuing the export market, rather than using seaweed as a processed product as a food product. Even though many processed seaweed foods also come from Tawau.
The need for ready-to-eat food purchased from Tawau, the raw materials also come from Sebatik such as chocolate, fish, seaweed, bananas, and secondary crops. It can be described as follows, raw chocolate from Sebatik is sold to Tawau, then the people of Sebatik buy "Milo" chocolate from Tawau. Likewise with bananas, banana chips, banana "sale" and so on. Exactly the food processing business can be done by women when the men are busy with seaweed cultivation. The women were directed to form a food processing farmer group, then trained to process raw materials into ready-to-eat ingredients. Food processing from seaweed requires tools that need to be trained for the group. To increase women's entrepreneurial activities, it is not only the availability of resources that must be continuously developed (Sari, Priatna, &   The opportunities to maximize the empowerment of women farmers in Liang Bunyu are; abundant natural resources can become social capital (Rudiatin, 2018a). With this social capital, women farmers on the border are prosperous, which is not difficult to develop their businesses.
The government must create a particular program in assisting and providing lessons for women farmers to be more productive. Peggy Sanday (Rosaldo & Lamphere, 1974)  Kuning. This condition is consistent with the research (Duflo, 2012).
Indian society shows growth economy, which reduces poverty and increases opportunities, does have a positive impact on gender equality.
Women farmers on the border are positioned only become male companions, although they are also the support for the family economy.
This usually happens in people whose welfare level is still low. Sarah Lowes (2020) examines the culture and well-being of women in the economic context of developing countries. In particular, she reviews works on how the structure of the kinship system and cultural practices affect women's production. The matrilineal system is more strategic for women's modes of production. The origins of this cultural practice are deeply rooted and closely linked to modes of production, female labor participation, and norms that limit women's sexuality. In contrast to the patrilineal culture in Sebatik, the role of women in the household economy is de facto recognized but has never been recognized de jure, thus affecting regional development policies, how they place women in regional economic development.  (2010) shows that the growth of SMEs in Indonesia, whose owners are women, is the third highest in the Asia Pacific.
Women's education is a very determining element, considering that educated human resources will affect the rapid development of the economy at the border. And on the other hand, the level of education and expertise possessed by women also influences them in choosing economic activities that they seriously do. These factors also affect women's attitudes in using their time and income. The quality of education and skills encourage them to think ahead, which is no longer selling raw materials but processing seaweed as processed products such as lunkhead, jelly, sweets, noodles, or meatballs. It could be more economic value than before.
The rich natural potential on the Sebatik-Nunukan border should be an opportunity to accelerate regional development. The agribusiness policies of the central government and especially local governments must continue to side with the community to continue to build a more advanced and prosperous economy. Empowerment of women and economic development will strengthen each other, and women can become government partners in economic growth to achieve community welfare. It also provides policy options that will help women farmers.
Accelerating the development of border areas also means protecting the entire population and the sovereignty of all regions in the country, securing regional development, and maintaining cooperation with neighboring countries in realizing the principle of peaceful, safe, and prosperous coexistence.
The importance of accelerating the development of border areas must pay attention to various points of view, including geographical aspects, demographic aspects, natural resources aspects, ideological aspects, political aspects, economic aspects, social aspects, and defense and security aspects, and especially the socio-cultural of the community.
For the Sebatik society, ethnicity networks and kinship are not only social capital but also economic capital. Entrepreneurial women farmers after