Jeff Hutton – The Indonesian administration of President Prabowo Subianto is pushing ahead with a multibillion-dollar plan to build a vast string of plantations in South Papua province that it hopes will secure domestic supplies of rice as well as sugarcane, as the government seeks to ramp up production of biofuel as a means of weaning itself off foreign sources of oil.
In mid-October, state-owned construction company PT Hutama Karya won a contract worth 4.8 trillion rupiah ($286 million), the biggest public tender so far this year, to build an 80-kilometer (50-mile) stretch of highway linking the coast of South Papua to the interior.
In early August, the deputy energy minister, Yuliot Tanjung, said building the food estate as well as the initial infrastructure of the bioethanol supply chain would cost $8 billion. The plans include a bioethanol factory in South Papua, which will start operating in 2027, as well as sugar factories and a 120-megawatt power station.
In May, the government appointed state-owned company PT Agrinas Pangan Nusantara to run the food estate, with funding for the project coming from the holding company for state-owned enterprises, Danantara.
Dating back to the 1990s under former president Suharto, food estates have appealed to multiple administrations since then as they flex the country's resources and scarcely populated regions such as Kalimantan and Papua to secure supplies of food like rice in order to limit imports.
Dictated from far-off Jakarta, the food estate initiatives have invariably faltered as lofty ambition collided with on-the-ground realities like soil types or local ambivalence. Suharto's Mega Rice Project degraded a million hectares (2.5 million acres) of peatland before learning the soil type was too acidic.
In 2020, the administration of Joko Widodo rolled out a similar plan, this time to insulate the country from possible food shortages as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Within a few years, heavy machinery was left rusting away near the village of Tewai Baru, in Central Kalimantan province, when the sandy soils there failed to support hundreds of hectares of cassava under the program.
Less than 9% of the land cleared at the Merauke Intergrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), an earlier iteration of the initiative now being championed by the Prabowo administration, was cleared under former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and just over 2% under Widodo.
Prabowo, a former son-in-law of Suharto, is doubling down on food estates by flexing his country's natural resources in an ideologically driven bid for self-sufficiency, especially in energy, through domestic production of biofuels.
The new road that was awarded in October will comprise the lion's share of a 135-km (84-mi) link from Wanam on the coast to Muting farther inland as the government announces plans to dramatically expand plantations in the area.
In September, the administration unveiled new presidential instructions to expand plantations around the Merauke Food Estate, including 250,000 hectares (618,000 acres) of oil palm for use in biodiesel. The government is setting aside 180 hectares (445 acres) for a new airport in addition to the existing Mopah Airport.
"The government is much more serious at the moment" about its plans for food estates, said Refki Saputra, a forest campaigner at Greenpeace Indonesia.
"They are looking for private investment and they are looking for international cooperation to help with the technology."
In October, Indonesia and Brazil signed a series of agreements in Jakarta during a visit by the country's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, including help developing fuels mixed with bioethanol.
"Prabowo's ambition of resource nationalism to reduce oil import dependency may trigger full political support for the ethanol," Bhima Yudhistira, executive director of the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios), told Mongabay.
"Lula's offer of technology during his visit shows that the Merauke Food Estate is a priority for this government."
The eight agreements with the South American country, said to be worth $5 billion, include support in the areas of trade promotion, quarantine standards and certification, statistics and hydroelectric power. Brazil has been producing ethanol in large quantities since the 1970s.
"Brazil is one of the world's leaders in bioenergy, particularly ethanol. Through this [agreement], we will seriously encourage technology transfer and the transfer of their experience to support the acceleration of the national bioenergy program," Bahlil Lahadalia, Indonesia's minister of energy and mineral resources, said in a statement.
Not everyone appears to be on board with the project.
In August, the chief executive of PT Agrinas Pangan Nusantara, Joao Angelo De Sousa Mota, stepped down just six months into the job, after officials at Danantara failed to supply a budget to the company.
"The serious intent of the president went without support from his aides and stakeholders, such that we lacked maximal support in practice – including budget support, which until today for Agrinas Pangan Nusantara is still zero," Mota was quoted by media as saying.
At issue is a cash injection of 8 trillion rupiah ($478 million) into PT Agrinas Pangan Nusantara promised by the former finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, pending a long-term business plan to the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises and approval from parliament.
A close ally of Prabowo's, Mota is a native of Timor-Leste and protested its separation from Indonesia in 1999. In February, Indonesia's defense minister, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, gave him an award in recognition of his service to national unity.
Mota has announced objectives to establish 425,000 hectares (1.05 million acres) of food estates for rice and cassava, including 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) in South Papua, as well as in Kalimantan and South Sumatra.
The trouble PT Agrinas Pangan Nusantara is having securing capital may reflect the financial challenges the project faces and the competing strains on the country's budget, Indonesia analyst Kevin O'Rourke told Mongabay.
The government's new Free Nutritious Meal program – free school lunches nationwide – is expected to cost 300 trillion rupiah ($17.9 billion) next year.
Meeting the government's bioethanol production target of 1.2 billion liters (317 million gallons) a year by the end of the decade would mean expanding output twentyfold, including building transport and storage infrastructure.
Domestic supplies of ethanol are expensive – more than 40% higher than the price per liter of subsidized gasoline.
Satellite imagery of the area in South Papua shows extensive clearing along the access road awarded to Hutama Karya. Roughly half of the first sugarcane concession, some 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres), appears to have been cleared.
While previous food estates were eventually derailed by meager budgets and limited local support, Prabowo is using the military and his connections with oligarchs as a workaround.
The Constitutional Court heard testimony in September from Indigenous people from Merauke that military personnel, known better by the acronym TNI, accompany construction workers and land-clearing equipment as a means of thwarting protests against leveling forests and draining swamps.
"They tore down the forests with the TNI present. Our people couldn't do anything – our swamps, our forests were all destroyed," Liborius Kodai Moiwend, a local resident, told the court.
The government is also pressing rich allies to pitch in.
Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, founder of the Jhonlin Group conglomerate and popularly known as Haji Isam, has been involved early in the project, clearing and transporting building material. Syamsuddin and the agriculture minister, Andi Amran Sulaiman, are cousins.
Syamsuddin ordered 2,000 Sany excavators – the largest such order the Chinese maker had received – attracting media attention for his purported enthusiasm for the project.
"The president is clearly in a big hurry," O'Rourke wrote in a message. "Thus the involvement of the government itself, via the Agriculture Ministry, the Army and Jhonlin."