By Hans Nicholas Jong in Jakarta

A top Indonesian official has declared a halt to new oil palm plantations in the country’s heavily forested West Papua region in favour of other – “greener” – crops, apparently contradicting his vigorous earlier defences of the industry.

The remarks by Luhut Pandjaitan, the chief minister in charge of investments, including in the palm oil industry, come in the wake of a court verdict ordering the government to publish maps and concession-holder details for plantations in Papua.

“We agree that [we] no longer want palm oil development here [in Papua],” Luhut said on February 27 as quoted by CNN Indonesia. “We’ve announced a moratorium on [new] palm oil [plantations] but now we’re strengthening it.”

READ MORE: Activists sceptical of win as court orders Papua plantation maps published

Luhut, speaking during a visit to the district of Sorong in West Papua province, said the companies investing in the palm oil industry in Papua were predominantly foreign ones or those controlled by wealthy Indonesian businesses, and that their investments “don’t necessarily benefit local people.”

“Don’t [let] only rich people cut down the forests and destroy us all,” he added.

‘Not being consistent’
Edi Sutrisno, the executive director of TuK Indonesia, an NGO that advocates for social justice in the agribusiness sector, questioned the about face by Luhut, widely seen as the Indonesian government’s most vocal defender of the palm oil industry.

“We’re confused because he’s not being consistent,” Edi told Mongabay. “So far, he’s been the main supporter of palm oil. So why did he issue such a statement?”

Luhut has led Indonesia’s diplomatic battle against European Union’s plans to end recognition of palm oil as a biofuel by 2030, even threatening to withdraw Indonesia from the Paris climate agreement in retaliation.

He also owns, through his family-run conglomerate, a string of palm oil companies. Last year, he declared palm oil a key commodity for Indonesia, which is the world’s top producer, and credited the industry with helping to alleviate poverty. (An estimated 20 million Indonesians are engaged in the palm oil industry.)

“We’ll fight whoever hampers the development of the palm oil industry in Indonesia,” Luhut said last April as quoted by local media. “The palm oil industry has played a significant role in reducing the poverty rate and creating jobs.”

Papua is home to a large variety of indigenous communities and Indonesia’s last great expanse of tropical rainforest. It’s an area increasingly targeted by the plantation and logging companies that have depleted much of the tropical rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo.

The combined area of oil palm concessions in the Papua region, comprised of the provinces of West Papua and Papua, is 18,099 sq km, according to the latest figure from Papua Atlas. Papua Atlas is a real-time interactive map showing the spread of plantations and roads in Papua region developed by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

A fifth of that figure, or 3,914 km2 (1,510 mi2), was controlled by just seven conglomerates as of 2017, according to a report by TuK Indonesia. That figure includes both developed (cleared) and undeveloped land.

“These figures show that palm oil plantation development in … Papua is almost exclusively in the hands of tycoon-controlled groups,” TuK Indonesia said in its report.

‘There’s no point’
Luhut said there were other crops better suited for the Papua region than oil palm, such as nutmeg, coffee, cacao and seaweed, which he presented to potential investors during his visit to Sorong in a “green investment” pitch.

“With green investment, people will start economic activities,” Luhut said as reported by CNN Indonesia. “The nature-based economy [will] grow and people can reap social benefits from it.”

He added the concept of green investment would contribute to protecting the forests of Papua, home to the third-largest expanse of tropical forest in the world, after the Amazon and the Congo Basin, and maintain the region as an important carbon sink in the fight against climate change.

The plan calls for $200 million in investments, said to directly benefit 60,000 households in the Papua region. He said Starbucks had agreed to invest there.

But activists are skeptical about the proposed switch, raising concerns that large-scale deforestation for palm plantations will simply be replaced by large-scale deforestation for other crops.

Franky Samperante, the director of Pusaka, an NGO that works with indigenous communities across Indonesia, said the problem with industrial-scale agriculture in Papua was not the commodity, but the development model. The top-down model as it works now, he said, fails to prioritize the needs of the local and indigenous communities, and fails to recognize their rights.

He cited the example of nutmeg, now being grown on land from which indigenous tribes were evicted in the district of Fakfak in West Papua province.

“So Luhut’s statement needs to be clarified,” Franky told Mongabay. “Green investment doesn’t only mean sustainable but we also need to ask who does it side with? If it’s only green but doesn’t side with the people, then there’s no point.”

The governor of West Papua, Dominggus Madacan, also advised residents against selling out their land to investors. He said history had shown that those who did so were inevitably impacted by deforestation and environmental degradation, including landslides.

“If you sell the land, the trees all around will be cut down and you’ll be left with bare land,” Dominggus said in Manokwari district on Feb. 25. “Then when disaster strikes, who will you blame?”

‘Textbook land grab’
Edi said the plan to invest in crops other than palm oil was similar to the government’s Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) programme, launched in 2011 to turn Papua’s Merauke district into the “future breadbasket of Indonesia.” That project, pitched by the government as the answer to Indonesia’s food security needs, has become a “textbook land grab”, activists say.

Only two of the 10 proposed blocks in the MIFEE project are supposed to include oil palm, but Greenpeace has noted that “significantly” more oil palm concessions will be included.

“They said that MIFEE was aimed to develop rice fields, but instead it’s oil palm plantations that are being developed,” Edi said. “Don’t let the statement [by Luhut] be a manipulation to make it seem like other commodities will be developed to make the public open to the idea, when in the end it’s all about palm oil.”

He said that despite the talk of prioritizing other crops deemed to be “green,” the fact remains that palm oil continues to be the most privileged in terms of incentives and other favorable policies offered by the government.

“The tendency is for the government to give incentives only for palm oil, not for other commodities,” Edi said. “So if civil society is sceptical, it’s normal because we don’t see incentives for other crops, such as cacao. Are there any factories to process cacao in Papua?”

Franky said he was concerned the voices of indigenous Papuans would be silenced, as they have been during the palm oil rush, under the plan to attract “green investments” to the region.

“In the meeting [on green investment in Sorong], I didn’t see representatives from local communities,” he said. “I only saw representatives from the local government. So I don’t know what the people think about it. The voices so far continue to be those of the central [government] and the investors there.”

Enforcing the moratorium
Franky said that if Luhut was serious, he should follow up his latest stance with concrete action.

“There needs to be a strong policy to support Luhut’s statement,” he said. “We can’t just accept a statement from an official who’s a politician and has investments there.”

He said there needed to be stronger enforcement of a prevailing moratorium on issuing new plantation permits, as well as greater scrutiny of existing permits. President Joko Widodo imposed the moratorium in September 2018 in response to fires in 2015 that razed large swaths of forest, including inside oil palm concessions. The moratorium is expected to end no later than September 2021.

But enforcement of the moratorium has been patchy, according to a report by Pusaka. It shows that the agrarian ministry, in charge of approving the plantation permits known as HGU, issued one to the company PT Permata Nusa Mandiri for a concession Papua’s Jayapura district in November 2018 — two months after the moratorium was enacted.

The report also identified continued instances of deforestation in areas earmarked for plantations, with 2,285 sq km of forest cleared last year.

Given how much land has already been allocated for oil palm plantations, the government must conduct a sweeping review of the issued permits and do more to recognise indigenous claims to disputed land, Franky said.

Short of that, he said, Luhut’s statement will ring hollow.

The government’s lack of recognition indigenous land rights is the missing key to the development of Papua, Franky said. Indonesia is home to hundreds of indigenous groups, but for decades their land rights were trumped by state control over all public land in the country.

In 2013, a historic Constitutional Court ruling removed customary forests from under state control. Since then, President Widodo has vowed to grant customary forest ownership titles to indigenous groups.

The Papua region, covering the western half of the island of New Guinea, is home to the greatest number of indigenous groups in Indonesia, but none have been granted titles to their ancestral forests.

In Papua province alone, an estimated 6,400 sq km of forest qualifies as customary land.

Republished from Mongabay under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk

Thousands of forest fires have been burning across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, disrupting air travel, closing schools and sickening thousands of people, reports the New York Times.

Officials have said that about 80 per cent of the fires were intentionally set to make room for lucrative cash crops like oil palm.

Spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster management agency Agus Wibowo said that these “slash and burn tactics” were the quickest and cheapest method for farmers to clear the land of its carbon rich rainforests.

READ MORE: Precarious politics pose threats to world’s three biggest rainforests

Aerial photographs have showed huge clouds of white smoke across vast areas of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, which is home to the endangered Orangutan.

The toxic haze from the fires has also been affecting neighbouring countries, with hundreds of schools in Malaysia forced to close, reports The Guardian.

Indonesian officials have reportedly attempted to deflect some of the blame for the smoke to fires in Malaysia.

“The Indonesian government has been systematically trying to resolve this to the best of its ability. Not all smog is from Indonesia,” said Indonesia’s Environment Minister, Siti Nurbaya Bakar.

However, her Malaysian counterpart Yeo Bee Yin has since released data from the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC), which showed the total number of hotspots in Kalimantan was 474 and 387 in Sumatra. By comparison, only seven were recorded in Malaysia.

According to CNA News, Indonesian president Joko Widodo has said he has “made every effort” to extinguish the fires by deploying aircraft and 6000 troops to the hot spots and holding a “salat istisqa”- a prayer to Allah for rain in times of drought.

If nothing comes of the prayer, Coordinating Minister for Politics, Security and Legal Affairs Wiranto has said that the government will seed the clouds with chemicals to prompt “artificial rainfall”, reports Detik News.

While 200 people have been arrested in relation to the fires, officials have said that air quality had been recorded as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” in Malaysia, Sarawak and Singapore.

Indonesian forest fires have been a major environmental and health issue in recent decades as dryer conditions and the growing global demand for palm oil exacerbate their spread.

The 2015 forest fires resulted in huge plumes of smoke reaching as far away as Cambodia. Research has estimated at least 23 million were affected and over 100,000 thousand were killed from respiratory related illnesses in Indonesia alone.

The cost to mitigate the 2015 haze was reported to be US$40 billion.

The fires in Indonesia have added to global alarm about the dire situation in Brazil, where blazes have consumed over 2 million acres of rainforest in the Amazon basin, known as the “lungs of the earth”.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By David Robie in Yogyakarta

In May, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo of Indonesia raised eyebrows across the archipelago when he inspected the Trans-Papua highway while trail blazing with a motorbike.

Tempo magazine, Indonesia’s most authoritative news magazine, remarked that he did this while “wearing only a thick jacket without a bullet proof vest”. Mentioning this lack of a flack jacket was tacit acknowledgement of the uncertain situation given an exponential rise of pro-independence sentiment in Indonesia’s two most eastern-most provinces of Papua and West Papua.

But Jokowi’s unconventional style of launching infrastructure projects didn’t just end there. Earlier this month he cruised along in a four-wheel drive vehicle on the recently completed Becakayu toll road, which had been languishing uncompleted for 18 years until his presidency gave the project a hurry up.

Last month, while giving a speech at Diponegoro University’s 60th Dies Natalis in Semarang, Central Java, Jokowi declared that infrastructure development was vitally important for the future in Indonesia. He wanted the country to become more competitive than its neighbours, such as Malaysia and Singapore.

“Why is our infrastructure being built?,” he asked rhetorically about the rapid pace and emphasis that he and Vice-President Jusuf Kalla have given the strategy – a marked contrast with other presidencies.

“The answer is that we want our competiveness to be better than other countries. Our global competiveness must be improved,” he said. “This year is pretty good as we have soared from 41st to 36th among 137 countries.”

The latest edition of Tempo magazine has devoted 38 pages to its cover story on infrastructure projects, headlining the fairly comprehensive report “Devil in the details”.

Few environmental reports
But absent from the range of quality articles was any serious report on the state of the environment in Indonesia — or environmental journalism, given that 2000 of the country’s 17,000 islands and 42 million households in a population of 261 million are at risk of “drowning” by 2050, according to a Listening Post report on Al Jazeera last month.

As Al Jazeera reported, “when you look at the [Indonesian] mainstream media, it is hard to find stories that go beyond catastrophes like forest fires or mudslides, examining who and what is behind them.”

A leading environmental journalism advocate has blamed lack of climate change and environmental reporting skills in Indonesian newsrooms for the lack of coverage.

“It is easier for journalists to cover sports or the economy, because they have scores and numbers,” Harry Surjadi, head of the Indonesian Society of Environmental Journalists, told Listening Post. “Those stories are much easier to write than environmental stories, where journalists have to understand biology, ecology, waste and chemistry.”

Nevertheless, Jokowi was praised by The Jakarta Post in a recent editorial for both his development policies and his concern for the poor of the country with his popularity  climbing.

“His overwhelming attention to the basic needs of the people has made him rather obsessive with the objective of keeping the prices of food and other basic necessities stable, thereby keeping inflation below 4 percent,” the Post noted.

However, in its special development edition, Tempo said in an editorial that the Widodo administration was “racing against time” after three years in government to complete its raft of planned infrastructure projects costing an estimated RP4,197 trillion (NZ$415 billion) between 2014 and 2019.

Many ambitious projects with an emphasis on developing the regions, especially eastern Indonesia — including Papua, are being worked on at the same time.

Projects’ sustainability
“All these activities spark public excitement, but also raise questions about the projects’ sustainability,” the magazine said.

“Jokowi’s choice to develop infrastructure is certainly not misplaced. Several studies show that infrastructure development in Indonesia was relatively backward in comparison with neighbours. Even worse: previous administrations spent more on fuel subsidies compared to physical construction,” Tempo commented.

In his Semarang speech, Jokowi said: “Why must we build? Because our country is an archipelago state, the marine foundation base is a must. Airport development was equally important as many islands could not be serviced by ship.

“So, on the remote islands of Natuna, Miangas, we are building an airport. This is just one example because we are building lots of small airports,” Jokowi added.

Tempo seemed to agree with this view by stating in its editorial: “In order to reach a healthy and growing economy, Indonesia needs new roads, bridges, power stations, airports and ports. This in turn requires massive funding.”

Some 42 percent of the required funding — the budget from the 2017 year has been almost tripled from RP177 trillion in Jokowi’s first year in office in 2014 to RP 4011 trillion this year — depends on allocations from the state budget, the magazine noted, plus money from state-owned businesses and private partnerships.

Tempo praised Jokowi for cutting back on energy subsidies, saying this was the right move to make – especially over fuel costs.

Sounding a warning
While also complimenting Jokowi on the boost for several jumbo projects that had stalled in recent years to ensure they get completed, Tempo also sounded a warning.

“Jokowi is racing against time. Infrastructure construction generally takes a while, and its economic benefits are only felt three to five years after construction begins: a time span which does not align with our five-year political cycle,” the magazine said.

“The government should avoid giving the impression that it is impatient to reap its rewards from the projects, especially once the cycle of political succession comes around. Good governance must not be abused for the sake of earning points for the next general elections [in 2019].”

Infrastructure highlights:

National: RP1,320 trillion (two programmes and 12 projects).

Bali and Nus Tenggara: RP11 trillion (15 projects, including the North Timor border crossing and supporting facilities).

Java Island: RP1,065 trillion (903 projects, including the 81km Serang-Panimbang toll road, MRT underground in Jakarta and public trains/railway).

Kalimantan: RP564 trillion (24 projects, including border crossings and facilities and the Serang-Balikpapan-Samarinda toll road).

Maluku and Papua: RP444 trillion (13 projects, including development of the Tangguh Train 3 LNG plant and the Palapa ring broadband).

Sulawesi: RP155 trillion (27 projects, including the Manado-Bitung toll road).

Sumatra: RP638 trillion (61 projects, including five sections of the Trans-Sumatra toll road).

According to a breakdown chart published by Tempo, partnerships with private companies would provide more than half the projected budget – 57.5 percent, with SOEs providing 30 percent and the balance of 12.5 percent from the state budget.

In a four-page interview with the magazine, Jokowi said that after touring across the country, from Sabang to Merauke, “I saw for myself how grave the inequality was”, and he was convinced that an expanded infrastructure would help reduce the gap.

“This is a matter of equality and justice. Besides, our infrastructure development has lagged far behind our neighbours,” he said.

“Infrastructure is a foundation for tackling the problem of inequality. If we want it easy, we just have to allocate the budget for subsidies and increased social assistance, so purchasing power will increase and the public is happy.

“But do we want to continue this kind of strategy? I took the risk by not resorting to this kind of political move, and instead diverted resources to infrastructure development.”

Yet surprisingly nothing in this otherwise comprehensive report addressed climate change and environmental issues, a critical component of sustainable development in Indonesia.

Forest fire devastation
Al Jazeera’s Listening Post report stressed how in 2015 huge fires swept through Indonesia’s rainforests. About 2.6 million hectares of forest was set ablaze to make way for palm oil plantations.

“The fires produced – in just three weeks – more greenhouse gases than Germany does in an entire year,” Listening Post said.

“Forest fires have become an annual occurrence in Indonesia, and still, the country’s media seldom devote the column centimetres and airtime needed to explore the causes behind them.”

Merah Ismail, campaign manager for the mining advocacy network JATAM, was quoted as saying: “When [the media] do cover forest fires or the effects of mining, they leave out “subjects like ‘water poisoned due to toxic waste or air pollution’ because they don’t know enough about those subjects”.

While Jokowi had announced in September 2015 that Indonesia would cut the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent by 2030, the nation’s news media have reported little on the progress, or lack of it, over this pledge — even with global debate on climate change at COP23 ongoing in Bonn this month.

With little media exposure or debate, the issue of the future of the rainforests has been framed as a tough choice – between the economy and the environment.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz