In the West Papuan regency of Merauke, close to the border with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia is rapidly clearing land in the world\u2019s largest ever deforestation project: three million hectares for sugarcane and rice production. Within three years, Indonesia plans to convert an expanse of forest roughly the size of Belgium into profitable monoculture. The ambition and destructiveness of the development distinguish it from previous mining or agribusiness initiatives in West Papua, which has been under Indonesian occupation since the 1960s. <\/p>\n
At a ground-breaking ceremony in June 2024, Indonesia\u2019s then president, Joko Widodo, described Merauke as Indonesia\u2019s future \u2018food barn\u2019. He also touted the potential of converting sugarcane into bioethanol fuel. (On the Raja Ampat islands meanwhile, Papuan activists are fighting plans to exploit nickel reserves for electric vehicle batteries.)<\/p>\n
Since formalising its control of West Papua in a fraudulent 1969 referendum, Indonesia has carried out genocidal military assaults \u2013 up to a quarter of West Papuans have been killed under occupation \u2013 and \u2018transmigration\u2019 settlement programmes that have reduced the Indigenous population to a minority. <\/p>\n
In the nine months since he took office, Indonesia\u2019s new president, Prabowo Subianto, has both restarted the transmigration programme and accelarated deforestation in West Papua. Widodo designated Merauke a \u2018National Strategic Project\u2019 (PSN), giving the state eminent domain powers to expel civilians. Fifty thousand Indigenous Papuans face displacement over the project\u2019s lifespan; already, people are finding vast tracts of their customary land have been closed to them, with wooden stakes signalling the expropriation by the Indonesian military.<\/p>\n
The human costs of the PSN, while severe, are eclipsed by its possible environmental consequences. The destruction of Merauke is set to release over 780 million<\/a> additional tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, more than doubling Indonesia\u2019s yearly emissions and leading to irreversible ecosystem collapse in one of the world\u2019s most biodiverse regions. Officials have pressed on with the development while trying to conceal its impact. The energy minister, Bahlil Lahadalia, in charge of parcelling out land to developers, has claimed there is \u2018no forest in the middle of Merauke \u2026 only eucalyptus, swamps and savannahs\u2019. But though the sago and paperbark mangroves that cover much of the Merauke landscape may appear sparse from above, they store up to 381 tons of carbon<\/a> per hectare \u2013 a higher concentration than the Amazon rainforest. <\/p>\n The PSN is not Indonesia\u2019s first attempt to convert Merauke into profitable farmland. In the 2010s, huge swathes of the rainforest were razed to make way for a palm oil mega-project, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE). It has been described by one researcher as effecting an \u2018ecologically-induced genocide<\/a>\u2019 of the Marind tribe, whose gardens and hunting grounds also extend into the territory now threatened by the PSN. As their forest recedes, the Marind are forced to rely on remittances from the corporations that have seized their land. Rice and instant noodles are replacing traditional sago cultivation. <\/p>\n In her book In the Shadow of the Palms<\/a>, Sophie Chao describes the warping effects that MIFEE has had on both the environment and the Marind worldview. Before palm oil arrived, the forest provided a rich network of relationships between people, plants and animals. Under the monocrop regime, everything is \u2018abu-abu\u2019 \u2013 grey, uncertain. In a new documentary<\/a> about Merauke, a Yei tribesman describes the transformation of his land in similarly alienated terms: \u2018Before, when I went there [to the forest], I could catch deer, pigs, fish \u2026 Now it\u2019s like I\u2019m half dead.\u2019<\/p>\n MIFEE was intended not only to boost Indonesia\u2019s food security, but also to make it a net exporter of rice and palm oil \u2013 to \u2018feed Indonesia, then the world\u2019. The profit motive is harder to identify in the Merauke PSN. Its advocates have instead emphasised national self-sufficiency, partly in response to the precarity of global supply chains exposed by the Covid pandemic. Even a staunch rightwinger like Prabowo can sound like an anti-colonial nationalist when discussing the project: \u2018How can a country be independent if it cannot feed its people?\u2019 he asked in 2023, when he was defence minister. <\/p>\n During Indonesia\u2019s three decades of dictatorship under Suharto (Prabowo\u2019s father-in-law), more than a third of its national revenue came from West Papua, much of it from the world\u2019s largest gold mine, which was operated until 2017 by the US company Freeport McMoran. But while the Freeport mine primarily enriched foreign and domestic elites, the Merauke PSN is designed to insulate ordinary Indonesians from food and energy shocks \u2013 caused by a climate crisis that the PSN will drastically worsen. Both ventures aimed to secure the future of the regime, though in different ways. West Papua has gone from being Indonesia\u2019s gold mine to its larder.<\/p>\n Where private interests are involved in the PSN, the principal beneficiaries are not foreign corporations but politically connected Indonesian entrepreneurs. Co-ordinating the project is the palm oil magnate Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, also known as Haji Isam (or the \u2018new poster boy of Indonesia\u2019s oligarchy\u2019<\/a>). Isam owns the Jhonlin Group, which has bought two thousand excavators from a Chinese company to begin the deforestation. His cousin, Amran Sulaiman, is the agriculture minister. <\/p>\n The military role in the development of the PSN goes far beyond their normal land-grabbing and security remit. Following a large recruitment drive in Java, more than three thousand additional troops have been deployed to Merauke, where they are directly engaged in felling and crop cultivation. Instagram posts show fresh-faced soldiers playing at farmers, ineptly watering crops or operating Isam\u2019s excavators. <\/p>\n Sulaiman has insisted that \u2018the military support is there because of a lack of manpower\u2019 \u2013 but while most of the soldiers deployed to Merauke may be new recruits, photographs have also surfaced of some sporting the insignia of Yonif Raiders, an elite combat unit notorious among West Papuans for their brutality. In August 2022, a troop of Raiders murdered four Papuan villagers and dumped their dismembered bodies in a local river. Such atrocities are commonplace in the West Papuan highlands, where the armed resistance movement is strongest and international scrutiny all but non-existent. <\/p>\n Merauke is a lowlands region, which may be one reason the PSN hasn\u2019t yet been met with violence from its opponents. Nonetheless, resistance has been immediate and widespread: there have been mass protests throughout West Papua, while a coalition of NGOs and Indigenous groups has drawn the UN\u2019s attention to the project. A UN fact-finding mission has long been a demand of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua<\/a> (ULMWP), a proto-governmental organisation uniting the three most significant independence factions, operating under the stewardship of the exiled leader Benny Wenda (I have worked with them). <\/p>\n While the forces arrayed against the ULMWP are forbidding \u2013 not least a decades-long ban on foreign media that has kept West Papua from international attention \u2013 the climate crisis gives their liberation struggle a global dimension. The New Guinea rainforest is the world\u2019s third largest, after the Amazon and the Congo. Uniquely, tribal struggles for land rights in West Papua form part of a wider revolutionary movement that seeks to replace military-corporate domination with Indigenous sovereignty and a \u2018green state<\/a>\u2019. Wenda has urged environmental activists to \u2018accept climate catastrophe or fight for a free West Papua\u2019. Merauke will determine their choice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the West Papuan regency of Merauke, close to the border with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia is rapidly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-54761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}