Indonesia

The Indonesia government's Food Estates programme could could lead to corruption, where corporate and state actors and their family and friends – not West Papuans – benefit from the allocation of land for Food Estates.

New Guinea, contains the world’s largest planned oil palm plantation. Covering 2,800 square kilometers the Tanah Merah project is nearly the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. However, the true owners of the seven concessions that make up the project remain hidden through a shroud of corporate secrecy.

Food estate atau komplek pangan skala-luas, yang punya rekam jejak kegagalan di masa sebelumnya, muncul di tengah konteks lebih genting. Ia rilis ketika pandemi menunjukkan bahwa sistem pangan global dominan hari ini ternyata rentan menghadapi krisis.

Colonial and anti-colonial movements’ have deeply shaped the patterns and impacts of concessions in Southeast Asia. In some cases, communities have experienced dispossession through land grabs dressed as concessions. In others, concessions are part of a re-concentration of land holding.

Did Indonesia just save a forest the size of Belgium? Or open the floodgates for its destruction? One giant, controversial palm plantation development, whose permits were among those cancelled, will be a crucial test.

Indonesia’s food estate program, billed as improving domestic food availability, has had the opposite effect on farmers recruited into the scheme, a new study shows.

Experts warn that providing companies with an option to dispute the revocation opens up room for corruption, and gives companies time to speed up the exploitation of the land while the revocations remain non-binding.

An area nearly the size of Belgium will be cleared in Indonesia’s Papua province to grow food crops under a government program. A new analysis shows that this conversion alone could result in the release of 616 million metric tons of greenhouse gases — a third of what Indonesia as a whole currently emits in a year.

On January 5, 2022 the Government of Indonesia revoked over 2000 permits of mining and plantation companies, which included 26 oil palm plantation companies in Papua Province and 22 companies in West Papua Province. But reports showed that several companies including Indofood Group plantation are still operating without Land Use Rights.

More than 2,000 mining, plantation and forest-use permits have been revoked by Indonesian government due to non-compliance or because they had been unused, tightening oversight of the nation's natural resources.

Koalisi masyarakat adat yang terancam menjadi korban perusahaan perkebunan kelapa sawit terus menyatakan dukungan terhadap Bupati Sorong Selatan yang mencabut ijin perkebunan kelapa sawit. Dan memandang tindakan perusahaan memperkarakan keputusan Bupati sebagai wujud sikap perusahaan yang tidak menghormati hak-hak Orang Asli Papua.

When the Indonesian government announced ambitious plans to ramp up domestic food production as the pandemic set in last June, officials claimed that it would not lead to “environmental destruction”. An investigation by The Gecko Project and Tempo reveals how the ministry has exploited regulations that were drafted hastily during the pandemic, stripping away environmental safeguards and opening up vast new areas of land for agriculture.