Do Indonesia’s food estates solve the nation’s food crisis? Activists, indigenous tribes don’t think so

Indonesia launched the food estate programme in 2020, with millions of hectares of land in Kalimantan, Papua earmarked for conversion for agricultural planting

Poor planning and ignoring advice of indigenous groups resulted in flooding, failed crops and left behind arid, barren land that could exacerbate the climate crisis

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To protest the clearing of customary land in Kalimantan or Indonesian Borneo to make way for “food estates” or industrial agriculture programmes, climate activists in Indonesia unfurled a massive banner at Gunung Mas in Central Kalimantan that read “Food Estate Feeding Climate Crisis”. Photo: Greenpeace

Published: 2:00pm, 20 Nov 2022

As delegates at COP27, the United Nations climate change conference held in Egypt, discuss the climate crisis, activists in Indonesia have been determined not to be left out of the discourse.

To protest the clearing of customary land in Kalimantan or Indonesian Borneo to make way for “food estates” or industrial agriculture programmes, climate activists in Indonesia on November 10 unfurled a massive banner at Gunung Mas in Central Kalimantan that read “Food Estate Feeding Climate Crisis”.

Activists – members of Greenpeace Indonesia, the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, the Legal Aid Institute in Palangkaraya and NGO Save Our Borneo – said that such estates exclude indigenous communities from their own land, fail to produce promised crops and worsen the climate crisis.

“The food estates were created in response to fears of a food crisis at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Muhamad Habibi, Director of Save Our Borneo told This Week In Asia. “But they were created without a plan and without involving the local community. They were not a serious answer to the perceived threat.”

As the pandemic spread across the world at the start of 2020, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation cautioned that Covid-19 had the potential to disrupt food supply chains and impact global economies as a result.

In response to the warning, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, launched the controversial food estate programme in which millions of hectares of land in Kalimantan and Papua was earmarked for conversion for agricultural planting.

Most of the industrial agriculture were rice fields and cassava plantations such as the one at Gunung Mas, and some of the land was forested indigenous land, according to a report by Greenpeace and local activists.