In Indonesia’s Rainforest, a Mega-Farm Project Is Plowing Ahead

The plight of the people of Wanam and the wider area earmarked for the project has been garnering international attention. Envoys from the United Nations warned in March that Prabowo’s megaproject jeopardizes the livelihoods and traditions of tens of thousands of forest dwellers. Meanwhile, environmentalists charge that Prabowo’s scheme is the largest deforestation project currently underway anywhere in the world. 

Located in the Merauke Regency of the province of South Papua, on the island of New Guinea, the project — known as the Food and Energy Estate — has long been a goal of the Indonesian government. In 2023, it was relaunched by Prabowo’s predecessor Joko Widodo as a national strategic project, allowing it to fast-track the red tape.

Now, under Prabowo, it is being expanded to cover more than 7 million acres and dramatically accelerated. He also plans another smaller estate on the island of Borneo. The aim is to grow enough rice to end the country’s reliance on imports and to provide millions of tons of sugarcane to make ethanol, a biofuel that will help achieve Prabowo’s parallel pledge for national energy self-sufficiency. But the collateral damage will be high, conservationists and human rights advocates say. 

Until now, the area planned for the estate has remained “largely intact — protected by its remoteness, extreme climate [and a] strong Indigenous presence,” says landscape ecologist David Gaveau, who runs TreeMap, a consultancy that monitors deforestation in Indonesia. The project would also be entirely within one of New Guinea’s most treasured ecoregions, the TransFly, a patchwork of flooded grasslands, forest, and savanna that stretches across the south of the island from Indonesian Papua into the neighboring nation of Papua New Guinea.  

Named after the Fly River that crosses it, the TransFly has long been inhabited and protected by Indigenous Marind and other related tribes. It contains a heady mixture of both tropical rainforest species, including the endemic New Guinea crocodile, and Australian savanna species such as tree kangaroos, wallabies, gliding possums, and the dusky pademelon, one of the world’s smallest marsupials. 

The TransFly is also home to half of the 800 or so bird species on New Guinea, including numerous species of birds of paradise, famed for their plumage, and the cassowary, a giant flightless ostrich-like bird whose feathers have long been highly prized for tribal headdresses. And its wetlands serve as an important stopping-off point for birds migrating between Siberia and Australia. 

Michele Bowe, formerly the TransFly Ecoregion Coordinator for the environment group WWF, says parts of the region have suffered from palm-oil cultivation and a wildlife trade in turtles and cockatoos, “but there are still substantial tracts of amazing forests and wetlands that are vital to protect.” She spent years developing a transboundary conservation plan that was agreed with Indigenous people and government officials a decade ago. But only three small areas in the Indonesian TransFly are currently protected. And now they too are threatened. 

The new mega-farm will surround the protected areas and altogether consume a fifth of the entire TransFly ecozone, including about half the area inside Indonesian Papua, according to a mapping study by Mighty Earth, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group, which monitors deforestation in Indonesia. 

The Merauke Food and Energy Estate is a combined effort of the Indonesian Ministry of Defense and a handful of major Indonesian corporations with reported links to the president. The Jhonlin Group, headed by palm-oil magnate Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, is developing the roughly 2.5 million acres of rice paddy earmarked for the west of the regency. Last year, the group bought 2,000 land excavators from Chinese company Sany at a cost of $250 million to clear land and dig irrigation channels. Meanwhile, the Merauke Sugar Group, owned by the family of Indonesian oligarch Martias Fangiono, has to date been awarded more than 1.25 million acres of concessions for growing sugar. 

Military engineers and guards will be a constant presence. Local news reports say that in recent months the Ministry of Defense has sent five infantry battalions, with more than 3,000 personnel, to the area. Their job is “to assist the government in accelerating development,” according to their commander General Agus Subiyanto. 

The pace of that acceleration is creating confrontations with the local people. According to Margareth Aritonang, formerly of the Gecko Project, a U.K.-based nonprofit investigative news service, the first that some villagers heard of the estate plan is when soldiers arrived and planted stakes on their land, closely followed by excavators tearing down their forest.  

In March, nine U.N.-appointed special rapporteurs — independent advisors on human and environmental rights — visited the area. They reported that the mega-farm was “jeopardizing the survival of local wildlife and endangering the cultural heritage of Indigenous communities that depend on them.” The team found that “more than 50,000 Indigenous people living in 40 villages… will be directly affected by its implementation” and that many were being “criminalized for advocating for their rights.” 

Indonesian media reported last year on an unpublished study by the government’s own land inspection body, Sucofindo, that appeared to contradict this. It reportedly complained about the absence of environmental impact assessments for the project and warned that 80 percent of the earmarked land is on the communal territories of Indigenous people. The government did not respond to requests for further comment. But in a formal response to the U.N. rapporteurs, the government said it always protected human rights, denied allegations of misconduct, and insisted the project was taking place on land designated by the state for development.

Whatever the legal issues, “the situation has become a disaster, particularly for Indigenous Papuans,” says Hipolitus Wangge, a researcher specializing in Indonesian politics at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia.  “For them, land and nature are not just places to live, they embody their identity, culture, and way of life,” he says.

In recent years, there have been high expectations that Indonesia had turned a corner on curbing deforestation, which once rivaled that in Brazil. Forest loss has declined dramatically in former hotspots such as Sumatra and Borneo since 2019, when then-president Widodo announced a permanent moratorium on both forest destruction and drainage of peatlands. 

But critics question how the rules are being applied in Papua. Mighty Earth has shown major overlaps between the Merauke Sugar Group’s concessions and the government’s maps of primary forest and peatlands supposedly covered by the moratorium. 

Meanwhile, the clearing of the land is under way. Analysis of satellite images by Gaveau at the end of June, showed the military had already completed 25 miles of an 84-mile access road penetrating swamp forests east of Wanam. The road will link up to the existing Trans-Papua Highway, “creating a continuous road corridor across southern Papua… opening access to forests,” says Gaveau. 

On either side of the road, almost 16,000 acres of former swamp forest have so far been cleared and drained for rice farms, according to the satellite images, while workers on the Fangiono sugar concessions have cleared more than twice as much. Across the whole Merauke estate, Gaveau found that 55,000 acres of natural ecosystems have been cleared, almost half forest, and the rest swamp, savanna, and grassland. Mighty Earth cites such evidence in making its claim that the Merauke estate is now “the world’s largest deforestation project.” 

Critics say Prabowo’s push to food self-sufficiency harks back to the worst days of the country’s disgraced dictator from 1967 to 1998, President Suharto, who once mentored the young soldier Prabowo and became his father-in-law. Suharto’s liking for major agricultural projects included his flagship Mega-Rice project in the peat swamps of Borneo. It drained 2.5 million acres, but was abandoned as soils acidified and fires took hold in the dried peat. Some soil scientists familiar with the two areas say the Merauke project faces the same fate. 

Government ministers have said they can counter the acid soils in Merauke by applying lime.  But Wirastuti Widyatmanti, a geographer at the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, warns that soil studies carried out for the government have never been published, so this hope cannot be independently corroborated. 

“I am worried that in 20 years people will visit the Papua project and see an ecological wasteland without much agricultural production to show for it. Just like the Mega-Rice project,” says Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth.

In a second reprise of his former mentor’s policies, Prabowo has also called for Indonesians from other islands to sign up to work the new fields. Critics see this as a revival of Suharto’s widely disparaged transmigration schemes, when around a million farmers from Java and other densely populated islands were moved to Papua, eventually outnumbering natives in some areas. 

The fear is that however successful it may be at growing food crops, the project will inflame long-standing tensions between the people of Papua and the Indonesian government. Papua has a distinct identity. Its inhabitants are mostly Melanesian tribes, who are predominantly Christian, whereas the rest of Indonesia comprises the world’s largest Muslim nation. 

Unlike East Timor, which gained independence from Indonesia in 2002, there has never been outright insurrection in Papua. But tensions persist, and a separatist Free Papua Movement has engaged in sporadic activity, attacking both civilian and military targets. The mega-farm could become a new focus for armed resistance, warns Wangge. 

A century ago, the island of New Guinea was famous for supplying colorful plumage from birds of paradise that adorned the hats of fashionable women in Paris, London, and New York. Before finding movie fame, a young Errol Flynn spent time there, hunting the birds for their plumes. 

The trade was eventually banned. But Errol Fuller, author of The Lost Birds of Paradise, documents how one of the last big seizures of contraband plumes, made in England in 1923, included boxes from Merauke that contained 60 feathered skins of what turned out to be an unknown hybrid sub-species. Ornithologists eventually named it Lupton’s Bird of Paradise, after the border guard who found them. 

The hybrid is thought to persist in the swamp forests of the TransFly. Whether it can survive the arrival of the mega-farm remains to be seen.