Hans Nicholas Jong, Jakarta – Indonesia has launched a sweeping and militarized crackdown on illegal forest use, reclaiming millions of hectares of land – but civil society groups warn the campaign is displacing Indigenous peoples while sparing corporate offenders and entrenching land inequality.
Under a regulation issued in January, President Prabowo Subianto established a task force to crack down on illegal activities inside forest areas, such as oil palm cultivation and mining.
Illegal oil palm plantations alone occupy a combined 3.37 million hectares (8.33 million acres) of forests, or an area larger than Belgium, and account for a significant portion of palm oil output in Indonesia, the world's top producer of the commodity.
Since its launch in February 2025, the task force has reclaimed 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) and handed over nearly half that land to a state-owned plantation company, PT Agrinas Palma Nusantara.
This potentially creates what could be the world's largest state-owned palm oil company by land area, and risks replacing private land monopolies with a state-owned one, critics say.
Critics say the regulation makes no distinction between large-scale corporate activities and those of local communities, including Indigenous peoples who have historically faced tenure conflicts due to unilateral forest area designations.
As a result, the crackdown has displaced Indigenous and local communities, while shielding large corporations, and transferred land to Agrinas without due process, according to an analysis by the country's largest environmental NGO, Walhi.
'Exploitative deals'
In Aceh province, on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra, the task force has seized 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of land in three districts. Most of it had been planted with crops like durian and candlenut by local communities, said Afifuddin Acal, the head of advocacy and campaigns at Walhi's Aceh chapter.
Yet no action was taken against major companies operating in the same province, even though 3% of all licensed oil palm concessions in Aceh reportedly overlap with forest areas, making them subject to seizure by the task force, Afifuddin said.
In Jambi province, also on Sumatra, nine companies operate plantations in forest areas, but only one has reportedly had the land seized by the task force, said Ginda Harahap, Walhi's Jambi director. At the same time, the task force has seized community lands that had been formally recognized by the government, he added.
This includes 820 hectares (2,030 acres) of community plantation forests – part of a government scheme that gives local communities a 35-year lease to manage state-owned forests for timber and other resources, Ginda said.
The communities behind these plantation forests are now in the middle of a public consultation process with Agrinas for the return of the land, he said. But what Agrinas has offered instead is a profit-sharing scheme, in which the communities will get 60% of whatever revenue is generated from the plantation forests, and the company will keep the remaining 40%, Ginda said.
He called this an exploitative deal: "The communities do all the work and bear the costs, yet 40% of the profits go to Agrinas."
He added, "We believe there's no need to share profits with Agrinas, especially since the government has already granted these rights to the communities in the form of community timber plantations."
Communities 'losing their rights'
Over in West Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, the government has seized illegal concessions from companies, but not returned the land to the communities that have long claimed it was stolen from them.
Four plantation companies have seen their lands seized by the task force and handed over to Agrinas, said Indra Syahnanda, the head of research and campaign at Walhi's West Kalimantan chapter. At least one of these companies, PT Satria Multi Sukses, still has unresolved land conflicts with local residents, who have demanded the return of 238 hectares (588 acres) of their customary land that was included inside the concession boundary, Indra said.
"The seizure of this land [by the state] has now resulted in the community losing their rights to manage it, because the task force took control without giving the land back to the people," he said.
Tesso Nilo
In Sumatra's Riau province, land within Tesso Nilo National Park has become a focal point of what Walhi calls the task force's selective enforcement, where the government has evicted smallholder farmers while ignoring larger offenders.
The national park boasts one of the highest levels of lowland plant diversity known to science and harbors an estimated 3% of Earth's mammal species, including critically endangered Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae) and Sumatran elephants (Elephas maximus sumatranus).
But Tesso Nilo's forests – and the plants and animals that depend on them – are quickly disappearing due to the rapid expansion of illegal oil palm plantations. The national park officially covers an area of 81,793 hectares (202,115 acres) – but around 70,000 hectares (nearly 173,000 acres), or almost 90% it, have reportedly been illegally cleared and planted with oil palms, mostly by smallholder farmers, according to the Ministry of Environment.
In June, the task force began cracking down on these illegal plantations and evicting people from the national park by installing fences, building guard posts and deploying 380 personnel. It has given thousands of families until Aug. 22 to relocate, despite the area's history of Indigenous land tenure since 1999 – five years before the park was established. According to an initial government survey, about 11,000 households, or 40,000 people, will have to relocate by the August deadline.
"With an ultimatum from the task force that communities must leave Tesso Nilo [by then], it's extremely difficult," said Eko Yunanda, the organization manager at Walhi's Riau chapter. "People have to think about relocating their homes and how to continue their children's education."
The crackdown has reportedly forced the closure of dozens of schools inside the national park. A recent video that went viral on social media shows uniformed children sitting on a blue tarp on the ground amid oil palm trees, shut out of their school.
Munafrizal Manan, the head of human rights services and compliance at the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, expressed concern about these closures, saying the right to education is fundamental and must not be sacrificed in the name of forest reclamation or relocation.
"Policies must be framed around the protection and fulfillment of citizens' basic rights, including children's right to education in Tesso Nilo," Munafrizal said in a statement.
The ministry has called on the task force to avoid rushing the relocation of residents until a fair, rights-based solution is found.
There are also concerns the crackdown is targeting small farmers while leaving big actors untouched.
On June 23, police arrested Jasman, the customary leader of one of the villages inside the national park, for selling parcels of his land that were subsequently cultivated with oil palms. At the same time, however, a local legislator named Suyadi, who since 2009 has operated 311 hectares (768 acres) of oil palm plantation in Tesso Nilo, has been let off after relinquishing the land to the task force.
In Suyadi's case, police said they opted not to arrest the politician as they wanted to prioritize "restorative justice," a mechanism that focuses more on remedying harm than on punishing the violator. While the Indonesian legal system encourages restorative rather than punitive justice for minor, nonviolent offenses, Suyadi's infractions were far more serious, according to Roni Saputra, legal director of environmental NGO Auriga Nusantara.
He said restorative justice doesn't apply in this case, as the crime involved a protected forest, caused ecological harm, and exceeded the financial threshold that would qualify it as a minor offence.
Eko of Walhi also criticized the two-tiered policing.
"If we agree that restoring Tesso Nilo is necessary, then we must start by cracking down on corporations and big investors first," he said. "Only after that should the government assess the role of smallholders – because the state must stand with the people."
Difa Shafira, head of forestry and land governance at the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), said large operators like Suyadi are given a pass thanks to the legal ambiguity of the presidential regulation underlying the task force's work.
She said the regulation provides no clear guidelines for when to apply administrative, civil or criminal sanctions, creating opportunities for enforcers to act arbitrarily.
"Right now, there's too much room for discretion, creating the potential for abuse," Difa said.
Environmental rehabilitation
The seized plantations in Tesso Nilo will be handed over to the authority of the Ministry of Forestry for rehabilitated, according to Taqiuddin, the ministry's head of forest encroachment enforcement.
The forestry ministry has a plan to reforest 7,000 hectares (13,300 acres) of the affected area. But there's no clarity on what will happen with the rest of the seized land.
"Who is responsible for restoration?" Difa said. "What is the road map? Where the money will come from?"
Uli Arta Siagian, Walhi's forest and plantation campaign manager, said the forestry ministry should vastly increase its rehabilitation target, noting that the ministry is also part of the task force."What's the point of them being in the task force if they can't advocate for environmental restoration?" she said. "If we talk about asset recovery... that's the forest itself, which must be restored. If they're not advocating for forest restoration, then they don't deserve to call themselves environmental stewards."
Oversimplifying a complex issue
Difa blamed a clause on "state asset repossession" in the regulation for allowing the government to seize land without verifying ownership or community rights. Legal experts point out that no such provision exists under prevailing forest laws.
"This gives the task force legitimacy to seize assets without checking whether communities live or farm there," Difa said.
Further compounding the issue is the lack of a provision requiring the task force to verify whether land targeted for repossession belongs to communities, she added.
"So the main target ends up being community farms, because there are no safeguards [for smallholder rights] built into the presidential regulation," Difa said.
She added the effect of the presidential regulation is to oversimplify through enforcement what is a deeply complex issue of illegal activities in forest areas that stem from a wide range of factors – from policy failures, to intentional corporate encroachment, to smallholder and Indigenous land uses.
In treating all these cases uniformly, and ignoring their vastly different social, historical and ecological contexts, the regulation fails to promote meaningful forest governance or justice, and instead focuses on asset recovery, administrative fines and selective criminalization, Difa said.
Calls for new law to punish violators
Activists are calling on the government to amend the forestry law, which dates back in 1999 and fails to address the complex reality of oil palm cultivation in forest areas, or to protect community rights.
Difa said the current law is outdated, overly punitive, prone to abuse, and blind to social and ecological realities. She said a comprehensive revision is needed that centers justice, ecological restoration and meaningful governance. Such a new law should recognize and protect Indigenous and local communities with historical ties to the forest, as well as distinguish between corporate violations and smallholder land use, she said.
It should also mandate ecological recovery as a legal obligation, and close legal loopholes that currently allow corporate actors to evade accountability, Difa added.
Uli of Walhi echoed the call, saying Indonesia's forest governance and law enforcement has worsened since the establishment of the task force. She said this is evident not just in the selective enforcement, but also in the government's failure to prosecute corporate offenders in even the most egregious cases.
Under a controversial 2020 law, illegal palm oil operators cultivating in forest areas before Nov. 2, 2020, and who completed all administrative requirements for amnesty by Nov. 2, 2023, face no punishment.
No amnesty should be forthcoming after those cutoff dates, Difa said. Yet the violators in the ongoing seizures by the task force, like Suyadi, are getting away by simply handing over the land, with no sanctions in sight, she said.
Operating illegal plantations inside a forest area is punishable under a 2013 law on forest destruction with up to 10 years' imprisonment and 10 billion rupiah ($610,000) in fines.
"To our knowledge, not a single company has been criminally prosecuted for establishing oil palm plantations in forest areas since November 2020," Uli said. "That's why we need a new law to address these issues. The revision to the forestry law is no longer sufficient to address tenure problems. We need a new forestry law that reflects the current realities."