Indonesia: The New Old Strategy of Food Estates
JAKARTA | 17 JANUARY 2025
At the core of the Indonesian government’s string of initiatives on food self-sufficiency – a stop to rice imports this year, the use of reserved forests to grow food and an increase in production targets for rice, sugar, salt – is the new but old, and controversial, food estate programme.
It is central to the government of President Prabowo Subianto, whose October inaugural speech laid down the goal of making Indonesia, a country of 277.5 million people, self-sufficient in food within five years.
“I have studied this alongside experts who assist me, and I am confident that within four to five years at the latest, we will achieve food self-sufficiency,” he said. This is not only a domestic goal, he continued: “On top of that, we will be prepared to become a global food estate.”
It is a tall order for a country that has been relying heavily on key food imports such as rice, wheat, soy and sugar, over the last two decades. Rice imports rose by 121.24% from January to August 2023 to the same period in 2024. For 2024, the Ministry of Economic Affairs increased the rice importation quota by 1.6 million tonnes, to reach 3.6 million tonnes because domestic output was inadequate, and rice prices were going up.
Indonesia’s new leaders are putting the brakes on this trend. In late December, Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs Zulkifli Hasan said Indonesia would not import rice in 2025 to make room for local farmers to hike production, and is increasing the target for rice reserves from 2 to 2.5 million tonnes.
Importation of consumption salt, sugar and corn for animal feed will also be stopped, and the country will produce more of these locally, he said.
These announcements rest on the Prabowo government’s expansion of the food estate programme launched by former President Joko Widodo in 2020.
Crafted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted the country’s food system as several countries suspended exports, this programme aimed to achieve food security, reduce dependency on imports, as well respond to the climate crisis.
It entailed the creation of large-scale commercial food plantation projects for chili, rice, cassava, corn, bean and potato in provinces like Central Kalimantan, North Sumatra and East Nusa Tenggara, Yogjakarta, West Java, East Java and Papua.
“If the government pushes food industrialization for food self-sufficiency, we need to ask who are they supporting – the project investors. Because the farmers’ lives are still in survival mode,” said Tejo Wahyu Jatmiko from Persatuan Indonesia Berseru.
But failures in several regions have been reported widely, with research and advocacy groups documenting abandoned swathes of land, local and indigenous communities losing access to their land, the draining of carbon-absorbing peatlands for the conversion of these and other lands into commercial plantations, and poor crop yields and pest infestations.
Indonesia’s Audit Board itself found problems with the food estate programme in 2021, concluding that its implementation did not reflect lessons from past projects and was not based on sustainable farming and often showed poor management and knowledge, for instance about the suitability of soil to crops. The board “recommends that the Minister of Agriculture evaluate the competency and integrity of personnel that had been in charge of the food estate project”, its report said.
The Prabowo government says it is adopting more sustainable strategies in its version of the food estate scheme, such as taking steps to increase yields, including through the use of new technology and farming techniques instead of covering more land, as well as focusing on already degraded land.
But critics say these do not cure the fundamental flaws of the programme, which at its core is top-down, disrespectful of the cultural and social diversity among Indonesia’s different ethnicities and approaches food as an industrialized and commercial good.
“(This) food estate programme will fail,” just as the Jokowi version did, Dwi Andreas Santosa, a professor of agriculture at Bogor Agricultural University, said in an interview.
“If everybody knows that the food estate programme will fail but will still be done, it is because the government wants to gain money from the project,” said Wahyu Perdana, advocacy and campaign manager at Pantau Gambut, a non-government group working on peatland sustainability.
Laksmi A Savitri, an environmental and gender researcher, sees an ideological factor behind Indonesia’s repeated use and failures of food estate programmes. “They (its supporters) believe that the ideal form of modern farming is through big-scale mechanized agriculture.”
The large-scale plantation approach to food production has been used in different parts of the world through time, involving methods that have evolved from using combine harvesters to today’s smart farming, she explains. “This productivism paradigm is successful in Europe and the United States, where they applied mechanized agriculture,” Laksmi said in an interview. “That technology fits them. The situation in Indonesia is different.”
FAR FROM NEW
The Jokowi and Prabowo versions of the food estate programme are among several that past governments have tried – with some variations but the same large-scale approach by the central government of opening up land and focusing on a few crops.
Food self-sufficiency is also a familiar byword, bringing to mind former President Suharto’s food revolution campaign that poured massive investments into rice farming in the 70s and 80s. In 1985, Indonesia reached rice self-sufficiency for the first time – an achievement that earned Suharto, who was unseated in a 1998 popular uprising, an award from the United Nations.
Rice became the country’s main staple under this food modernization project, although rice (and later wheat)-based diets are not native to many indigenous communities. Some of their traditional diets, for instance, are heavy on tubers, such as cassava and arrowroot.
Forced changes in diets and ways of life are among the destructive impacts of the industrial approach used in food estate programmes, which have also displaced local communities, especially indigenous ones, and cut them off from forest land that sustains them.
“The problem is, whose land is going to be cultivated? All the land in Papua, Kalimantan, Sumatra are the lands of indigenous peoples that have their own rules. These lands have owners. It’s a never-ending problem until today,” said Laksmi, who has done extensive research on food estates and land optimization in Indonesia.
“We just want to say that we refuse the [presence of the food estate] companies [in Merauke]. Because they came without permission from us, the chiefs of the villages,” Yasinta Moiwend, who hails from Wanam village in Merauke in South Papua province, which lies at the eastern end of Indonesia’s archipelago, was quoted as saying in a BBC Indonesia report.
The 60-year-old took part in a Jakarta protest in October 2024, ahead of Prabowo’s visit to her village to check on a 100,000-hectare area – which used to be forest land – that was being turned into rice paddy.
The expansion of the Merauke food estate, planted to rice as well as sugarcane by business groups from outside the region, was already underway during Jokowi’s government. In total, the area covered by the food estate would reach 2.29 million hectares, an area that Tempo news describes as 70 times the area of the capital Jakarta.
When he was campaigning for the presidency, Prabowo, who was Jokowi’s defence minister and an army general in the Suharto dictatorship years, said people “do not understand” that the food estate programme will make food prices cheaper.
But his government’s food estate programme in Merauke is “like hearing an old song being played yet again,” Tempo said in an editorial.
In January, Tempo’s investigation found that the expansion of the food estate project in North Sumatra – approved by the Jokowi government at the end of its term – “has the potential to destroy preserved natural forests and to encroach on land of indigenous peoples who have long fought for recognition of their rights.”
“The new government should stop adding to the damage caused by the previous administration,” the Tempo editorial said.
It said the government has not learned from the failure of an earlier horticultural food programme in Ria-ria village, where 90% of the 215-hectare pilot area was abandoned. Rice and coffee farmers were forced to plant red onions, garlic and potatoes – crops that are “outside their area of expertise”, the editorial added.
If the government really wants to reach food self-sufficiency, it should focus on diversification instead of selecting a few crops it chooses for communities, Wahyu points out, and “not force land clearing for rice paddy in Papua”. Crop diversification could bring 10 times more than current yields, he says.
“If the government pushes food industrialization for food self-sufficiency, we need to ask who are they supporting – the project investors. Because the farmers’ lives are still in survival mode,” said Tejo Wahyu Jatmiko from Persatuan Indonesia Berseru, a civil society group that focuses on the food sector.
Food estate failures have been documented too in Central Kalimantan, where the Jokowi administration allocated 44,000 hectares of land for a food estate.
Fifty percent of the peatland cleared to make way for rice paddy in the Central Kalimantan food estate was abandoned, says the ‘Field of False’ report by Pantau Gambut. The rice crops that were growing yielded just 3.5 tonnes of grain per hectare, behind the 4-tonne-per-hectare output needed to meet the country’s rice demand, it says.
The October 2024 report documented that only 1% of the 243,216 hectares of peatland in the estate was suited to the cultivation of food crops. Only one-tenth of this 1% area was suited to rice cultivation. Pantau Gambut also found plantations of palm – not food crops – in Palingkau Jaya, Palingkau Asri and Tajepan villages.
Because peatlands have acidic soil, low in nutrition and often vulnerable to fire, these “are not suitable for big-scale farming”, its report explained.
“Monoculture farming is almost impossible to do by individual or family farming. Also, in our history, food needs have never been fulfilled through industrial approach,” Wahyu explained.
FAIL – AND REPEAT?
The use of large-scale plantations for food goes back decades, including in both South Papua and Central Kalimantan.
The first food estate projects were created by the colonial Dutch government in Selat Jaran, South Sumatra in 1919, Laksmi says. They were set up to grow rice to feed palm plantation workers from China, since Java’s rice fields could not supply enough.
The Dutch copied the food estate approach and mechanization farming from the United States, where it was for wheat production. “They imported farming tools from the US to replicate the method. But the land in Indonesia is different. There are many peatlands and swamp. The project failed,” Laksmi said in an interview. The colonial government had also concluded that a food estate could not be sustained without involving local people, she adds.
In 1956, the Indonesian government tried another food estate project in Merauke, operated by locals. “It succeeded but then failed because of pests that were caused by forest clearing,” said Laksmi.
In 1998, the government embarked on a huge programme to turn one million hectares of peatlands into rice fields – and moved 13,500 families to Central Kalimantan to manage these.
But “there were no rice paddies that could grow,” said Andreas, who was an environmental impact risk analyst for this peatland development programme. The number of people was also far too small for 31,000 hectares of land.
At that time, she recalls, government agencies did not always follow land conversion policies, which required that four indicators – from soil suitability to the absence of adverse socio-economic impacts – needed to be met before a food estate could proceed.
This programme later ended, and peatland rehabilitation began to be carried out. The clearing of peatlands, which are made up of soil and partly decayed vegetation, contributed to what was among the country’s worst forest fires in West Kalimantan in 2015.
Merauke was also the location of a food estate programme, covering 1.2 million hectares of forest and peatland, that was created under former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s government in 2010.
Called Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), its aims were similar to today’s food estate push – to meet domestic food needs and reduce food importation.
This programme violated the land rights of indigenous communities, according to research by Pusaka Bentala Rakyat, an indigenous rights advocacy group. MIFEE has also been called a “textbook landgrab” and an example of the destruction of an indigenous community.
“We think that the food estate programme has failed to achieve its goals: strengthening the food system and empowering the local community,” said the report by Pusaka, which evaluated the project 10 years after it began.
It said that after MIFEE, the Malind and indigenous residents of Zanegi village, who are hunter gatherers indigenous to Papua, found themselves cut off from the forests they use for food and having to go farther to hunt. The government paid the Malind community just 1,000 Indonesian rupiah – the equivalent of 0.61 US dollars today – per hectare of land included in the food estate.
Andreas added that only one among 37 private investors in MIFEE was from the food sector and the rest were in sugarcane and palm plantations.
BALANCE DESTROYED
Massive land clearing to make way for food estates and similar schemes has far-reaching impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity.
For example, the Ogan Komering Ilir community in South Sumatra is home to a buffalo population that eats a particular kind of grass that grows on peatlands, says Wahyu from Pantau Gambut. After the peatlands were drained, the buffalo found it harder to find food. This in turn affected the locals, because they get some income from buffalo livestock.
Arie Rompas, forest campaigner at Greenpeace Indonesia, says that the creation of large food estates threatens biodiversity because it means more loss of forest cover in natural forests and conservation areas.
From 2020 to 2022, three Central Kalimantan districts lost almost 4,000 hectares of forest cover, according to Pantau Gambut’s report. Gunung Mas district, site of the food estate project, found itself at greater risk of flooding after its forest was cleared. In 2023, a fire burned 91,352 hectares of these cleared peatlands.
Hashim Djojohadikusumo, the head of Indonesia’s delegation to the 29th United Nations climate summit in 2024 and Prabowo’s envoy for energy and the environment, says the country will carry out reforestation, including in degraded land and forest land. This will start with 500,000 hectares this year and reach a total of 6.5 million hectares in forest areas.
“Thus, the food estate programme continues while we mitigate the possible negative impacts with new programs, one of which is reforestation,” he said.
But afforestation – growing trees in areas that have been degraded or abandoned – does not quite replace natural-growth forests and lands.
“Afforestation needs a long process. There has never been clear data on afforestation in Indonesia,” Greenpeace Indonesia’s Arie said, adding that forests grown from afforestation capture less carbon than natural ones. He added, “the government could do afforestation through industrial forest plantation, which they will cut again after five years.”
In these last two decades, Indonesia’s leaders have been trying to address two worrisome trends – decreasing farmland and a declining number of farmers. Time and again, they have turned to the food estate or similar programmes despite their failures.
A major obstacle is various governments’ failure to see other essential food commodities besides rice, corn, and soy, and to respect the country’s diverse food cultures, says Tejo.
Instead of giving unlimited privileges to corporate investors, the Indonesian government needs to focus on small farmers, who have a different and organic relationship with the land and food resources. Said Tejo: “We need agricultural reform that will benefit small farmers, who are the essential actors in food self-sufficiency.”
*Joan Rumengan is a journalist based in Jakarta.
(END/Reporting ASEAN/Edited by J Son)
