Indonesia’s Fight: Commercial Farming vs. Rainforest Preservation

Indigenous hunter in Papuan rainforest. Photo by buzzine.com.

Expanding farm lands to feed ever growing human populations and livestock, or conserving rainforests that many consider the lungs of the Earth?

It’s always a hard question in itself, and in the situation of Indonesia’s Papua province, it’s even more complicated.

As the Rainforest Information Centre puts it - “Rainforests have been called the “Lungs of the Earth,” but the term is misleading. Although rainforests do release vast amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, they absorb just as much through the decay of organic matter. However, they do play an important role in regulating the Earth’s atmosphere by storing carbon in their biomass. When forests are destroyed, the carbon they contain is released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.”

Scientists are forever debating whether global warning is real. Even for those that don’t believe that global warming is real, rainforest deforestation also destroys the habitats of untold numbers of species that make them home. And, lets not forget all the natural medicines that have been discovered and that those that never will.

The Indonesian government wants to develop a 1.2 million hectare (3 million acre) food estate in Merauke, West Papua, according to Reuters. West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea. It borders the independent state of Papua New Guinea and lies just 250 km north of Australia.

Papua New Guinea possesses one of the planet’s largest remaining tropical rainforests. At least 75 percent of its original forest cover is still standing, occupying vast, biologically rich tracts over 100,000 square miles in all. Its forests provide: the habitat for about 200 species of mammals; 20,000 species of plants; 1,500 species of trees; and 750 species of birds (half of which are endemic to the island). Information and map courtesy of the Barcelona Field Studies Centre.

The East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN), a U.S.-based grassroots support organization, estimates the land expected to be developed to be at 1.6 million hectares, and believes that “the pilot program aims to attract domestic and international investors with a series of tax breaks and could be a model for other zones in eastern Indonesia.”

The environmental non-government organization (NGO) Greenomics Indonesia claims most of the 1.6 million hectares of estate crops to be planted across Papua will encroach into forests in Merauke. Greenomics told The Jakarta Post that its analysis of data provided by the Forestry Ministry shows Merauke only has 360,000 hectares of production forest that can be converted for other purposes, including plantations.”

Greenomics claims that of the 4.7 million hectares of land in Merauke, 95 percent is still forest and 3.42 million hectares of it is virgin.

Beyond deforestation concerns, ETAN fears that “the government will streamline the land acquisition process and facilitate immigration for foreign workers. In practical terms, Papuans will be forced to sell their land to big business at the expense of local people.

“This will eventually lead the country to losing sovereignty in our food production. Food estates could also lead to feudalism because the role of the indigenous farmers will be just to provide labor to the capital owners.”

Several investors have already joined the Merauke food estate project including: PT Medco Energy International Tbk, PT Bangun Cipta, PT Wilmar International, and PT Industri Gula Nusantara, according to information provided by the Indonesian government’s State Secretariat to Reuters.

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