As COP30 begins in Belém, Brazil, we the undersigned express our profound concern over the intensifying deforestation currently occurring in West Papua, Indonesia.
West Papua has been under Indonesian control since a controversial 1969 process, “the Act of Free Choice”, which saw 1026 West Papuans vote for integration into Indonesia under conditions of intimidation and violence. In 2019, the Act of Free Choice was described by the UK Government as “utterly flawed”. The number of West Papuans killed since Indonesian rule began has been estimated at between 100,000 and 540,000, while a state-backed ‘transmigration’ policy which has relocated more than 800,000 Indonesians to West Papua has likely made the indigenous population a minority.
Indonesian governance in West Papua is characterised by corruption, violation of Indigenous land rights, and widespread deforestation. 71% of the decrease in West Papua’s forest cover has occurred since 2011. Given that the territory contains over half of the world’s third largest rainforest, protecting this unique environment is critical to the preservation of a habitable planet. West Papua is also home to a number of extremely destructive industrial projects. Since 1988, US company Freeport McMoran has operated the world’s largest and most toxic gold mine in the Mimika Regency, which dumps over 200,000 tonnes of toxic tailings into the local Aikwa river system daily.
More recent deforestation in West Papua has concentrated in agribusiness initiatives as well as mining. In 2024, a government-designated National Strategic Project (PSN) was launched in the southeastern Regency of Merauke, dedicated to sugarcane and rice production. Spanning more than three million hectares in total, the Merauke PSN has been described by conservation news service Mongabay as the largest deforestation project in human history. Upon completion, the PSN will release 782.45 million additional tonnes of CO2, more than doubling Indonesia’s existing yearly CO2 emissions. Much of the Merauke landscape is covered by Melaleuca paperbark trees, which store up to 381 tons of carbon per hectare. This makes the Merauke rainforest a denser CO2 sink than the Amazon rainforest.
As is often the case in West Papua, the Merauke mega-project appears to have been launched without consultation with indigenous West Papuans, deepening an already widespread sense of disenfranchisement and marginalisation. Industrial policy in West Papua is marked by a consistent violation of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). In another example of this trend, a 2018 investigation into the Tanah Merah mega-plantation in Boven Digoel revealed that all seven of the permits for oil palm concessions had been falsified.
We observe that industrial development is one of the major drivers of violence and internal displacement in West Papua. According to data compiled by human rights defenders on the ground, a total of 102,966 West Papuans were currently displaced as of October 2025.
This interplay between deforestation and displacement is perhaps clearest in Intan Jaya Regency, where an area of forest the size of Jakarta is currently being cleared for the development of the Wabu Block gold mine. A 2022 Amnesty International report described construction at Wabu Block as having resulted in a ‘clear escalation’ in militarisation, including beatings, restrictions on free movement, extrajudicial killings, and a greatly increased number of military checkpoints.
Intan Jaya has been a site of intense conflict and multiple human rights abuses in 2025, as construction on the Wabu Block has accelerated. On October 15th, fifteen civilians were massacred during an Indonesian military raid on Soanggama Village. A similar atrocity was committed in May 2025, when up to fifteen West Papuans were killed or disappeared in Sugapa district. The victims of this massacre included a minor, a 75-year-old, and two women, one of whom was buried by Indonesian soldiers in a shallow grave. In March, a series of aerial military bombardments destroyed a number of villages in Intan Jaya, prompting hundreds of civilians to flee.
We express our deep concern that Indonesia’s programme of deforestation in West Papua, is incompatible with UN’s sustainable development goals, as well as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility set to be launched at COP30.
We urge leaders at COP to protect the natural environment of the unique rainforest of West Papua. Specifically, we urge leaders to support the Green State Vision developed by the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) for an environmentally just and sustainable West Papua.
Alex Sobel, MP, UK, Labour Party, IPWP Chair Carles Puigdemont, MEP, Catalonia (Spanish State), Junts, IPWP Vice-Chair Gorka Elejabarrieta, Senator, Basque Country (Spanish State), EH Bildu, IPWP Vice-Chair Matthew Wale MP, Leader of the Opposition, Solomon Islands, IPWP Vice-Chair Lord Lexden OBE, UK, Conservative Rt. Reverend Lord Harries of Pentregarth, UK, Crossbench Maggie Chapman MSP, Scotland (UK), Scottish Greens Ross Greer MSP, Scotland (UK), Scottish Greens Jeremy Corbyn, MP, UK, Your Party Baroness Nathalie Bennett of Manor Castle, UK, Green Party Nadia Whittome, MP, UK, Labour Party
STRONG FOCUS ON COP, CLIMATE and UNIFIED STRENGTH OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
This event was organised by The Australian West Papua Association (SA) (AWPA) supported by Conservation Council of SA and Pacific Islands Council of SA PICSA
The Free Family Event was a community fair – a number of organisations had stalls and presences including:
Asian Australians for Climate Solutions
AWPA – environment and political info
XRSA – flyers, free badges, write climate solutions on our whiteboard – about 8 XR members assisted
Face painting
Kid’s activities – focusing on tree kangaroos
Fijian and Papua New guinea dancers – organised by Tukini Tavui (Fiji) CEO PICSA
Hindmarsh Greens
Fusion Party
Sea Shepherd
Food trucks
Channel 9 came to film the dancers
The evening event had about 120 people attending (including more XR members and friends joining) – a good showing in the auditorium. Uncle Moogy welcomed us to country with stories about water sources and connections across country through groundwater.
Chairing the session:Koteka Wenda … the advertised chair was not available but young West Papuan activist-in-exile Koteka Wenda stood in: setting a unifying and gracious tone of welcome, and speaking of her own upbringing and connection to country.
Speakers: all were intensely political and focused on indigenous justice and justice for country. There was a strong focus on the Pacific peoples and on COP31, and the wider interests of millions of first nations peoples.
Arabella Douglas – from Currie Country South-East Queensland/ northern NSW .
Topics:
Recent appeals to the International Court of Justice on compensation for climate damage, and on recognition of Palestine.
Strong interest by (so-called) Pacific nations in Aust bid to hold COP31 in Adelaide,
The stance of Pacific nations in leading the approach on climate.
History of the greater land mass of SAHUL (New Guinea and Australia were once joined and still share bird and animal and plant species, long history of connection and trading,
Severe impact of climate – and moves to create unified climate solutions: examples: plant mangroves as sea-protection, and to close down the many extractive industries
Impacts of climate risk on indigenous people here – opportunities to join with Pacifika peoples. Examples of injustice – poor management of northern rivers.
Drawbacks – Fed monies received for Native Title compensations and restitutions have conditions so that they cannot be used to sue the Fed Govt.
Opportunities for appeals to the ICJ (Int Court of Justice) over climate crisis impacts as a violation of human rights. Want to get problems such as Algal Bloom and damage to Murray-Darling basin onto the COP agenda.
Opportunity for Australia to have a seat on the UN Security Council (although the 5 permanent-seat nations have rights of veto)
Uncles Pabai and Paul of Torres Strait raised a case in the Aust courts, alleging the government had failed to meaningfully address climate change.
Students from the University of the South Pacific took a case to the ICJ in 2019 to advise on the obligations of governments to address climate change under international law
Ali (Kenny) Mirin – West Papuan writer and advocate … topics:
West Papua is arguably the world’s most biodiverse and most threatened region
Illegal logging, multi-national corporations, military protection … impacts for people: restrict access to forests and food sources – + hunting, medicine
Destruction of place-identification markers such as large trees – these mark boundaries between tribes and overstepping boundaries leads to inter-tribal conflicts – there are no written records – instead a story-telling system and a land-place/moiety system
Major corp: MIFEE (Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate) – land grab … https://www.etan.org/news/2011/mifee.htm world’s largest deforestation for sugar cane .. clearing of native mangrove, sago, paperbark, wetland destruction, incursion of roads, multi species of frogs, high elevations, fragmented habitats … add climate impacts increased temp and rainfall.
50,000 – 60,000 internally displaced people due to Indonesian Military
Media censorship and communication difficulties – PNG has more than 800 languages.
Rowena – Samoan woman now living in Adelaide … topics
Pacifika peoples have contributed least to climate change but have the most serious impacts – example – nuclear waste dump flooded by rising sea levels
Repressions with all the usual methods – forbidden to use language, students confined to dormitories.
Climate justice is indistinguishable from land justice.
The Australian government claims to protect pacific “family” but at the same time rewards and supports “those who would destroy us”.
Habitat protection needed
Solution to climate catastrophe is to Speak the Truth
People in Aust do not know where Samoa is
People in the Pacific do not know where Adelaide is “is it near Perth?” … but they know it when you say “It’s the place with the Santos HQ”.
Tiani Adamson (Wildlife Conservationist and Young South Australian of the Year 2024)
Tiani came from the northern Cape York peninsula – her people were forcibly relocated to Darwin. She is now based in Adelaide.
Focuses research on islands – 5% of landmass, > 20% of biodiversity, extreme speciation due to isolation, but vulnerability to introduced ferals.
Island and indigenous decision making is more community based, long term and not based on a 4 year election cycle.
Australian native food businesses are less than 5% owned by indigenous people
Need to nourish land and sea – and at the same time each other.
Most tropical countries are experiencing record-high deforestation rates, but in Indonesia, forest loss is slowing.
But nearly half of the forest cleared in 2024 can’t be linked to an identifiable driver, raising red flags about speculative land clearing, regulatory blind spots and delayed environmental harm.
Land is often cleared but not immediately used; research shows that nearly half of deforested lands in Indonesia remain idle for more than five years.
Experts say these trends signal regulatory failure, as the government issues permits widely and concession holders face few consequences for clearing forest and abandoning the land, creating a cycle of destruction without accountability.
JAKARTA — While most tropical countries experienced record-high deforestation rates in 2024, Indonesia’s forest loss is slowing, bucking a global trend.
But beneath the headline figures lies a troubling mystery: Nearly half of the forest cleared last year can’t be linked to any identifiable driver, raising red flags about speculative land clearing, regulatory blind spots and delayed environmental harm.
This uncertainty complicates supply chain accountability under laws like the EU Deforestation Regulation, and raises questions about who’s really clearing Indonesia’s forests — and why.
In 2024, Indonesia lost 242,000 hectares (598,000 acres) of primary forest, down 14% from 279,000 hectares (689,000 acres) in 2023, according to an analysis by TheTreeMap, a technology consultancy behind the Nusantara Atlas forest monitoring platform.
Annual Deforestation in Indonesia (2001-2024). Image courtesy of TheTreeMap.
TheTreeMap used satellite and time-series imagery to attribute deforestation to known drivers. They are logging (18%), industrial oil palm (13%), pulpwood/timber plantations (6%), mining (5%), food estate projects (3%) and fires (2.3%).
Together, these drivers explain just 47.3% of Indonesia’s 2024 primary forest loss — leaving the majority unattributed, which experts say reflects both data limitations and deeper governance failures.
What explains this gap in attribution? A likely reason is that land is cleared but not immediately used.
A study published in 2024 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that nearly half of all deforested land in Indonesia remained idle for at least five years — meaning it wasn’t converted to plantations, agriculture or any observable land use.
These areas are often eventually converted to agriculture — usually oil palm — but the long delay obscures who cleared the land and why, TheTreeMap noted.
There are many examples of these across Indonesia, said Timer Manurung, the director of the environmental NGO Auriga Nusantara.
In Riau and Bengkulu provinces on the island of Sumatra, for example, natural forests in some selective logging concessions have been cleared, and yet the permit owners seem to have abandoned the concessions.
As a result, oil palm investors moved in years later and began planting, Timer said.
A lone house is left standing at an abandoned village after a nearby mining concession degrades the surrounding environment. Image by Kemal Jufri/Greenpeace.
The deeper roots of idle land
While nearly half of Indonesia’s primary forest loss in 2024 remains unexplained, experts say this absence of clear attribution is not simply a data gap — it may be a warning sign of deeper governance issues.
One leading explanation is speculative clearing, when companies clear forests without immediately converting the land to plantations or infrastructure. According to Arief Wijaya, managing director of World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, this pattern has persisted since the 1990s, when companies obtained forestry or plantation permits, extracted valuable timber and left the land idle. In many cases, this was deliberate: either a lack of capital to proceed or part of a long-term land banking strategy.
These behaviors point to regulatory failure, as the issue of abandoned land is closely tied to the “reckless issuance of permits” by the government, said Boy Jerry Even Sembiring, the director of the Riau chapter of the country’s largest green group, Walhi.
Concession holders face few consequences for clearing forest and abandoning the land, creating a cycle of destruction without accountability. The result is a patchwork of degraded forestland, legal ambiguity and lost oversight — fertile ground for future land conflict, encroachment, opportunistic development and fires.
In an effort to address this, Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry earlier this year revoked 18 inactive forestry concessions covering more than 526,000 hectares (1.3 million acres). Minister Raja Juli Antoni framed the move as part of a broader push to reclaim unproductive concessions and reassert state control over idle forestland.
But Arief warned that the recent revocations barely scratch the surface.
“If we look at the broader picture, this land speculation has been happening for over 30 years,” he told Mongabay.
Without a systematic approach to identify, map and resolve the status of idle lands, the problem will persist — quietly fueling environmental degradation, sparking community conflict and undermining efforts to clean up supply chains, Arief said.
Once land is cleared and left idle, communities often move in and begin farming, sometimes triggering future land disputes, especially when the land is later contested by concession holders or targeted for development, he added.
Idle land is also prone to fires, activists say.
Boy of Walhi Riau said abandoned lands consistently burn during the dry season.
“After being cleared, they [idle lands] often burn, yet there’s no proper accountability or follow-up review process for these incidents,” he said.
Between 2001 and 2021, Indonesia lost more than 28 million hectares (69 million acres) of forest. However, since peaking in 2016, forest loss in Indonesia has continued to decline. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Turning idle land into opportunity
Therefore, Arief called on the government to come up with a targeted and comprehensive strategy.
The first order of action is to map where the idle lands are and identify their owners and jurisdictions. If during the mapping it turns out that communities have already controlled the land and conflicts have emerged, then the government needs to resolve the conflicts first, Arief said.
After that, the government and other stakeholders should develop a plan for how to use these lands — whether through rehabilitation, community use or reallocation, he said.
One option is to mandate the rehabilitation of the idle lands, if they are located within concessions.
Yuliusman, the director of Walhi South Sumatra, said concession owners need to be held responsible for the land they control, including when these lands are cleared and burned.
That’s why the government needs to make land ownership data available to the public so landowners can be held accountable, he said.
Another option is to grant communities rights to manage these idle lands through the social forestry scheme.
The program, initiated by President Prabowo Subianto’s predecessor, former President Joko Widodo, is one of the largest socioenvironmental experiments of its kind, aiming to reallocate 12.7 million hectares (31.4 million acres) of state forest to local communities and give them the legal standing to manage their forests.
By granting social forestry permits to communities with a clear business plan, the government could empower small farmers while bolstering food security at the same time, Arief said.
This aligns with the platform of Prabowo, who has prioritized achieving both food and energy self-sufficiency as cornerstones of his administration, he added.
Since his election campaign in late 2023 and early 2024, Prabowo has emphasized the need for Indonesia to achieve sovereignty in these critical sectors to bolster economic resilience and national security.
In December 2024, Minister Raja Juli announced the government had identified 20 million hectares (50 million acres) of forest area for potential conversion into “food and energy estates.”
The announcement raised concerns over new deforestation, especially if the areas include intact forests. But Arief said the plan could be positive — if those hectares are truly idle lands that have already been cleared and remain unproductive.
“If we already know there are 20 million hectares of low-productivity land, and we have a food security program, then we can map which crops are suitable — maybe some areas for rice paddies, others for water conservation, others for energy,” he said. “That’s where we need a road map.”
Recognizing the rights of communities to manage their lands could also help prevent fires, according to Rod Taylor, the global director of WRI’s forests program.
“I think some of the success in Indonesia [in mitigating fires] can be put down to really good collaboration between companies and communities, to not only prepare for big fires and a lot of enforcement of no burning laws, but also really fast response mechanism to spot and take action against fires before they can spread too far,” he said.
Having a road map that puts community rights at the forefront is also critical to resolving lingering land conflicts, said Timer of Auriga Nusantara.
It’s also necessary to address Indonesia’s deep-rooted structural injustice in land ownership. Today, 68% of the country’s land is controlled by just 1% of the population, as the state prioritizes concessions to large corporations over community land rights.
These large-scale infrastructure and resource extraction projects have pushed marginalized groups such as farmers, Indigenous communities and fisherfolk off of their lands.
Between 2015 and 2024, more than 3,200 agrarian conflicts broke out across 7.4 million hectares of land (18.3 million acres) — affecting 1.8 million households.
Timer warned against using the existence of idle land as a pretext to expand industrial agriculture, which he said would only deepen Indonesia’s land conflicts.
“We must avoid justifying the planting of monoculture commodities on deforested land in the name of ‘what’s already happened,’” he said. “If these areas must be converted, then they should be turned into social forestry zones — and owned by local communities, not corporations.”
Citation:
Parker, D., Tosiani, A., Yazid, M., Sari, I. L., Kartika, T., Kustiyo, … Hansen, M. C. (2024). Land in limbo: Nearly one third of Indonesia’s cleared old-growth forests left idle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(28). doi:10.1073/pnas.2318029121
Banner image: Peatlands destruction in Riau, 2014. While Indonesia has in the past been a major carbon emitter due to land-use change, deforestation, forest fires and peatland destruction, the recent decline in deforestation is seen as a positive sign. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
In the West Papuan regency of Merauke, close to the border with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia is rapidly clearing land in the world’s largest ever deforestation project: three million hectares for sugarcane and rice production. Within three years, Indonesia plans to convert an expanse of forest roughly the size of Belgium into profitable monoculture. The ambition and destructiveness of the development distinguish it from previous mining or agribusiness initiatives in West Papua, which has been under Indonesian occupation since the 1960s.
At a ground-breaking ceremony in June 2024, Indonesia’s then president, Joko Widodo, described Merauke as Indonesia’s future ‘food barn’. He also touted the potential of converting sugarcane into bioethanol fuel. (On the Raja Ampat islands meanwhile, Papuan activists are fighting plans to exploit nickel reserves for electric vehicle batteries.)
Since formalising its control of West Papua in a fraudulent 1969 referendum, Indonesia has carried out genocidal military assaults – up to a quarter of West Papuans have been killed under occupation – and ‘transmigration’ settlement programmes that have reduced the Indigenous population to a minority.
In the nine months since he took office, Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, has both restarted the transmigration programme and accelarated deforestation in West Papua. Widodo designated Merauke a ‘National Strategic Project’ (PSN), giving the state eminent domain powers to expel civilians. Fifty thousand Indigenous Papuans face displacement over the project’s lifespan; already, people are finding vast tracts of their customary land have been closed to them, with wooden stakes signalling the expropriation by the Indonesian military.
The human costs of the PSN, while severe, are eclipsed by its possible environmental consequences. The destruction of Merauke is set to release over 780 million additional tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, more than doubling Indonesia’s yearly emissions and leading to irreversible ecosystem collapse in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Officials have pressed on with the development while trying to conceal its impact. The energy minister, Bahlil Lahadalia, in charge of parcelling out land to developers, has claimed there is ‘no forest in the middle of Merauke … only eucalyptus, swamps and savannahs’. But though the sago and paperbark mangroves that cover much of the Merauke landscape may appear sparse from above, they store up to 381 tons of carbon per hectare – a higher concentration than the Amazon rainforest.
The PSN is not Indonesia’s first attempt to convert Merauke into profitable farmland. In the 2010s, huge swathes of the rainforest were razed to make way for a palm oil mega-project, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE). It has been described by one researcher as effecting an ‘ecologically-induced genocide’ of the Marind tribe, whose gardens and hunting grounds also extend into the territory now threatened by the PSN. As their forest recedes, the Marind are forced to rely on remittances from the corporations that have seized their land. Rice and instant noodles are replacing traditional sago cultivation.
In her book In the Shadow of the Palms, Sophie Chao describes the warping effects that MIFEE has had on both the environment and the Marind worldview. Before palm oil arrived, the forest provided a rich network of relationships between people, plants and animals. Under the monocrop regime, everything is ‘abu-abu’ – grey, uncertain. In a new documentaryabout Merauke, a Yei tribesman describes the transformation of his land in similarly alienated terms: ‘Before, when I went there [to the forest], I could catch deer, pigs, fish … Now it’s like I’m half dead.’
MIFEE was intended not only to boost Indonesia’s food security, but also to make it a net exporter of rice and palm oil – to ‘feed Indonesia, then the world’. The profit motive is harder to identify in the Merauke PSN. Its advocates have instead emphasised national self-sufficiency, partly in response to the precarity of global supply chains exposed by the Covid pandemic. Even a staunch rightwinger like Prabowo can sound like an anti-colonial nationalist when discussing the project: ‘How can a country be independent if it cannot feed its people?’ he asked in 2023, when he was defence minister.
During Indonesia’s three decades of dictatorship under Suharto (Prabowo’s father-in-law), more than a third of its national revenue came from West Papua, much of it from the world’s largest gold mine, which was operated until 2017 by the US company Freeport McMoran. But while the Freeport mine primarily enriched foreign and domestic elites, the Merauke PSN is designed to insulate ordinary Indonesians from food and energy shocks – caused by a climate crisis that the PSN will drastically worsen. Both ventures aimed to secure the future of the regime, though in different ways. West Papua has gone from being Indonesia’s gold mine to its larder.
Where private interests are involved in the PSN, the principal beneficiaries are not foreign corporations but politically connected Indonesian entrepreneurs. Co-ordinating the project is the palm oil magnate Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, also known as Haji Isam (or the ‘new poster boy of Indonesia’s oligarchy’). Isam owns the Jhonlin Group, which has bought two thousand excavators from a Chinese company to begin the deforestation. His cousin, Amran Sulaiman, is the agriculture minister.
The military role in the development of the PSN goes far beyond their normal land-grabbing and security remit. Following a large recruitment drive in Java, more than three thousand additional troops have been deployed to Merauke, where they are directly engaged in felling and crop cultivation. Instagram posts show fresh-faced soldiers playing at farmers, ineptly watering crops or operating Isam’s excavators.
Sulaiman has insisted that ‘the military support is there because of a lack of manpower’ – but while most of the soldiers deployed to Merauke may be new recruits, photographs have also surfaced of some sporting the insignia of Yonif Raiders, an elite combat unit notorious among West Papuans for their brutality. In August 2022, a troop of Raiders murdered four Papuan villagers and dumped their dismembered bodies in a local river. Such atrocities are commonplace in the West Papuan highlands, where the armed resistance movement is strongest and international scrutiny all but non-existent.
Merauke is a lowlands region, which may be one reason the PSN hasn’t yet been met with violence from its opponents. Nonetheless, resistance has been immediate and widespread: there have been mass protests throughout West Papua, while a coalition of NGOs and Indigenous groups has drawn the UN’s attention to the project. A UN fact-finding mission has long been a demand of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a proto-governmental organisation uniting the three most significant independence factions, operating under the stewardship of the exiled leader Benny Wenda (I have worked with them).
While the forces arrayed against the ULMWP are forbidding – not least a decades-long ban on foreign media that has kept West Papua from international attention – the climate crisis gives their liberation struggle a global dimension. The New Guinea rainforest is the world’s third largest, after the Amazon and the Congo. Uniquely, tribal struggles for land rights in West Papua form part of a wider revolutionary movement that seeks to replace military-corporate domination with Indigenous sovereignty and a ‘green state’. Wenda has urged environmental activists to ‘accept climate catastrophe or fight for a free West Papua’. Merauke will determine their choice.
A new documentary reveals the devastating impact of Indonesia’s National Strategic Project (PSN) in Merauke, Papua Selatan Province, exposing how large-scale agricultural expansion under the guise of national food security results in the systematic violation of indigenous rights and environmental degradation. The project aims to convert at least 1.6 million hectares of indigenous Malind territory into rice fields and sugarcane plantations, backed by heavy equipment and military presence. Indigenous communities report land seizures without giving their free, prior informed consent (FPIC), while military forces secure the project areas, underscoring the militarisation of development in West Papua.
The film highlights growing resistance from indigenous Malind communities, who reject all forms of corporate investment on their customary lands. In March 2025, over 250 participants at the ‘Merauke Solidarity’ forum condemned the PSN as a corporate-driven initiative that disregards indigenous rights and causes irreversible environmental harm. The project has already triggered deforestation, water contamination, and loss of livelihoods. A government decree has allowed the conversion of more than 13,000 hectares of forest, including protected areas and peatlands, raising serious concerns about Indonesia’s climate commitments.
Despite widespread protests and criticism, government officials, including President Prabowo Subianto, continue to promote the Merauke food estate as a modern agricultural hub. The project aligns with broader patterns of repression across West Papua, where opposition is met with violence and intimidation. Since August 2024, demonstrations against PSN and transmigration have faced heavy-handed crackdowns, reflecting a national strategy that prioritises economic interests over indigenous survival.
The documentary serves as a timely and urgent record of these developments, revealing the complex interplay between state power, corporate interests, and indigenous resistance. It underscores the need for international scrutiny and intervention, warning that the unchecked expansion of PSN projects will exacerbate land conflicts, environmental destruction, and cultural extinction in West Papua.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flooding: With apologies to T. S. Eliot
By Duncan Graham 11/7/25
Every year the UN runs a Climate Change Conference – the next is scheduled for November in Brazil. High on the agenda will be the plight of Pacific Islanders seeing their homes drown. There’s an equally pressing need close by, but the solutions seem doomed.
Indonesian authorities provide useful information for travellers checking if they’ve got to the right place: alongside the destination name is its height above sea level.
Surabaya, the capital of East Java, advertises it’s just two metres higher than the nearby waves. The Republic’s second-biggest city is a vital transport hub, a humid home to ten million and a trading and naval centre for more than a thousand years.
How many more is the figure to fear.
For the waters are rising and the beaches are drowning, most strikingly in the capital Jakarta 780km west along the coast of the Java Sea. It’s disappearing faster than any other city in the world, according to a BBC report:
“North Jakarta has sunk 2.5 metres in 10 years and is continuing to sink by as much as 25 centimetres a year in some parts, which is more than double the global average for coastal megacities.”
Global warming is a factor but the other culprits are illegal drilling for groundwater and excavating foundations for high-rise towers and a web of toll roads. Despite the predictions the rattle of pneumatic drills, the slurp of concrete pours and the nodding of dinosaur construction cranes continues day and night.
The BBC’s depressing information was broadcast seven years ago; horizontal lines drawn by shack owners on their timber walls to measure the rise are now invisible under the brown soup of plastics, nappies, cans and other trash that passes for water.
Lab-coated scientists taking samples to prove the pollutants are extreme would need extra protection because corrosives rot clothing.
So, what to do?
The last president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo decided the solution was to move. He reckoned the right place to raise a memorial to his foresight was 1200 km north-east of the descending capital. The first building rising above the greenery has been the palace.
This is East Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo, the biggest in the sprawling 17,000-island archipelago where orangutans once outnumbered their human relatives. That was before the timber cutters and palm-oil planters arrived to turn the pristine into profit.
Java is five times smaller than Borneo but immeasurably more important – the political, administrative and cultural centre of the Republic and home to more than 158 million. It’s the world’s most densely populated island and super-fertile, though much of the landscape is mountainous.
The proverb rindu kampung halaman means more than just a longing for home. It embraces family, community, culture, local language and history. For the Javanese, these magnets of birthplace exercise a powerful pull.
So the four million bureaucrats and their families who call Jakarta their place are not dashing to shift to East Kalimantan with its different climate and culture – now grandly titled Ibu Kota Nusantara, the Mother City of the Outer Islands.
Despite their city’s mess, many workers will need more than subsidies and promises of promotion to get them to move, particularly if they have partners and kids embedded in schools, sports and friendships.
All this along with a disinterest in tipping more money into the Jokowi ego monument is why his successor, President Prabowo Subianto, is pondering other ways to keep Jakarta residents above water.
The current favourite is the Great Wall of Java, already on the list of strategic projects in the 2025-2029 National Medium-Term Development Plan, though there are still no blueprints.
As a former military man before being cashiered in 1998, Prabowo sees rising seas as an invasion, so the best defence is fortification.
There are lessons from military history he needs to heed. The collapse of the French Maginot Line in 1940 showed that barricades are only as strong as their weak spots and there’ll be many as seas surge and waves undermine the president’s bulwark.
Like Canute, he can shout orders. But king tides only obey the pull of the moon.
So far, estimates of Great Wall measurements and costs are still being splashed around conference tables, but the best published stab is 500km and A$122 billion over two decades. That’s twice the current estimated cost of Jokowi’s IKN.
The figures are certain to rise faster than sea levels. The money will have to be drained from state budgets as the project is unlikely to attract even Chinese investors reportedly propping up IKN. How do you earn money from a venture trying to tame nature?
One idea is to build “a livable seawall that has residential and commercial zones, essentially turning the whole structure into a kind of floating city”. Swimming would be a required skill for buyers.
The omens aren’t good. Earlier attempts to build Jakarta dykes failed. One collapsed in 2007, five years after construction – no defence against a storm that took 80 lives.
_The Jakarta Post_ is not a cheerleader for the Prabowo plan: “Simply put, we don’t have enough money or possess the knowledge or experience to build the Java seawall… We could end up with another unfinished massive construction by the end of the current presidential term, only this time at sea.”
Maybe delegates to the UN Climate Change Conference will offer fresh solutions. Otherwise like Shelley’s Ozymandias, Prabowo’s mighty works will remind future generations how we lost the battle against global warming.
The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.
Duncan Graham
Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press). He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia. Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.
This article is sourced from The Lowy Institue’s The Interpreter first published 4/7/25
While Chinese firms capitalise on the country’s resources, the social and environmental damage lies squarely with Jakarta.
Smoke rises from Weda Bay Industrial Park, a major nickel processing and smelting hub in Central Halmahera, on 13 April 2025 (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
The destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests and reefs in the name of green energy is a tragedy, but not one that can be pinned solely on China.
Yes, China has played a central and highly visible role in Indonesia’s nickel boom. It is the largest consumer of Indonesian nickel, the primary financier behind smelters and industrial parks, and a dominant foreign actor influencing how extraction unfolds. But Chinese companies do not force their way into Indonesia’s forests – they are merely capitalising on the rules, and loopholes, established by the Indonesian state.
To understand how the world’s largest nickel reserves are being transformed into sacrifice zones, we must begin with a critical truth: the rush to exploit these resources is not driven solely by foreign demand, but by domestic politics and governance choices made in Jakarta.
While Chinese firms certainly profit from this permissive and often corrupt environment, it is Indonesian authorities who enable and perpetuate it.
It is Indonesia that grants mining permits – often through processes vulnerable to corruption. It is Indonesia that oversees (or fails to oversee) environmental and labour assessments. It is Indonesia that silences youth activists and sidelines Indigenous communities when they speak out against these projects. While Chinese firms certainly profit from this permissive and often corrupt environment, it is Indonesian authorities who enable and perpetuate it.
A recent case from Raja Ampat, a remote archipelago in West Papua, underscores the stakes of Indonesia’s nickel rush. Last month, Indigenous youth disrupted a mining summit in Jakarta, holding signs reading “Nickel Mines Destroy Lives”. Their viral protest, under the hashtag #SaveRajaAmpat, drew attention to the threat that nickel extraction poses to their home. Several protesters were detained.
Raja Ampat, renowned for its marine biodiversity and Indigenous communities, is already reeling from the impacts of nickel mining. Of the four companies licensed to operate in the region, PT Anugerah Surya Pratama – linked to China’s Vansun Group – cleared protected forests and polluted the sea around Manuran Island. Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment confirmed these violations. Only after public outcry did the government revoke the permit, but by then, much of the damage had already been done.
Workers at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park sit in traffic after a shift change at the nickel processing hub (Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)
The mining boom is not confined to far-flung Papua. In Central Sulawesi, Morowali has become the beating heart of Indonesia’s nickel processing industry. The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), largely financed and constructed by Chinese companies such as Tsingshan Holding Group, stands as a flagship Belt and Road project. But its meteoric rise has come at an enormous cost: air and water pollution, deforestation, and rising greenhouse gas emissions in what was once promoted as a “green” zone.
The social toll is just as severe. Labour conditions at IMIP have raised alarms, with reports of long hours, meagre pay, poor safety standards, and frequent accidents. Tensions between Chinese and Indonesian workers have flared into violence on multiple occasions. Yet despite these concerns, the park continues to expand. The economic incentives for all parties are simply too great, and regulatory enforcement is often undermined by corruption. Indonesia’s 2020 ban on nickel ore exports – intended to promote domestic value-added processing – successfully attracted foreign capital. But the regulatory framework governing labour rights, environmental protections, and community engagement has failed to keep pace.
A similar pattern has taken root in Weda Bay, Halmahera. There, vast industrial complexes built by Chinese and French firms have reshaped the landscape. Forests have been razed, rivers contaminated, and traditional livelihoods upended. Promises of economic opportunity have been hollowed out as locals report being excluded from decision-making and witnessing a growing divide between investors and communities.
No labour abuses, environmental violations, or community displacements occur without institutional neglect – often compounded by corruption.
Indonesia’s failures are not isolated – they are systemic. Environmental impact assessments are routinely manipulated, labour standards poorly enforced, and Indigenous voices sidelined. Corruption facilitates these breaches, creating an environment where compliance is optional. The most powerful investors – Chinese state-linked enterprises among them – adapt accordingly.
Still, this does not absolve China. As the global leader in battery production and the architect of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has committed to making its development model “green and sustainable”. Yet it continues to finance and profit from operations that destroy ecosystems, exploit labour, and marginalise communities. What Beijing would never tolerate on its own soil – clear-cutting protected forests or operating in unsafe conditions – it enables abroad.
If China truly intends to lead the global energy transition, it must hold its companies accountable. This means refusing to finance environmentally destructive projects, setting higher standards for overseas operations, and enforcing consequences for corporate misconduct – not just when global outcry forces its hand.
But ultimately, the responsibility lies with Indonesia. No Chinese company can operate in Indonesia without state approval. No labour abuses, environmental violations, or community displacements occur without institutional neglect – often compounded by corruption. If Indonesia hopes to be seen as a responsible steward of its natural wealth, it must overhaul how mining projects are licensed, monitored, and enforced. It must empower Indigenous peoples and protect workers with the same urgency it grants mining permits.
Indonesia’s nickel boom is a test of the country’s ability to balance economic growth with sustainable governance. From Raja Ampat to Morowali, the impact of unchecked mining is evident – forests are cleared, labour is exploited, and communities are displaced.
We cannot place the blame squarely on China. But we must acknowledge that Indonesia’s governance – and the corruption within it – ultimately sets the terms.
Through this direct action, Greenpeace aims to deliver an urgent message to the Indonesian government, nickel industry executives gathered at the event, and the wider public: nickel mining and processing are inflicting profound suffering on affected communities across Eastern Indonesia. The industry is razing forests, polluting vital water sources, rivers, seas, and air, and is exacerbating the climate crisis through its reliance on captive coal-fired power plants for processing.
“While the government and mining oligarchs discuss expanding the nickel industry at this conference, communities and our planet are already paying an unbearable price,” said Iqbal Damanik, Greenpeace Indonesia Forest Campaigner. “The relentless industrialization of nickel – accelerated by soaring demand for electric cars – has destroyed forestlands, rivers, and seas from Morowali, Konawe Utara, Kabaena, and Wawonii, to Halmahera and Obi. Now, nickel mining even threatens Raja Ampat in West Papua, a globally renowned biodiversity hotspot often called the last paradise on Earth.”
Following an investigative journey through West Papua, Greenpeace exposed mining activities on several islands within the Raja Ampat archipelago, including Gag Island, Kawe Island, and Manuran Island. These three are classified as small islands and, under the law concerning the management of coastal areas and small islands, should be off-limits to mining.
Greenpeace analysis reveals that nickel exploitation on these three islands has already led to the destruction of over 500 hectares of forest and specialised native vegetation. Extensive documentation shows soil runoff causing turbidity and sedimentation in coastal waters – a direct threat to Raja Ampat’s delicate coral reefs and marine ecosystems – as a result of deforestation and excavation.
Beyond Gag, Kawe, and Manuran, other small islands in Raja Ampat such as Batang Pele and Manyaifun are also under imminent threat from nickel mining. These two adjacent islands are situated approximately 30 kilometers from Piaynemo, the iconic karst island formation pictured on Indonesia’s Rp100,000 banknote.
Raja Ampat is celebrated for its extraordinary terrestrial and marine biodiversity. Its waters are home to 75 percent of the world’s coral species and over 2,500 species of fish. The islands themselves support 47 mammal species and 274 bird species. UNESCO has designated the Raja Ampat region as a global geopark.
Ronisel Mambrasar, a West Papuan youth from the Raja Ampat Nature Guardians (Aliansi Jaga Alam Raja Ampat), said, “Raja Ampat is in grave danger due to the presence of nickel mines on several islands, including my own home in Manyaifun and Batang Pele Islands. Nickel mining threatens our very existence. It will not only destroy the sea that has sustained our livelihoods for generations but is also fracturing the harmony of our communities, sowing conflict where there was once harmony.”
Greenpeace Indonesia urgently calls on the government to fundamentally reassess its nickel industrialization policies, which have already triggered a cascade of problems. The hollow boasts about the benefits of downstreaming, championed by the previous administration and now perpetuated during the presidency of Prabowo Subianto, must end. The nickel industrialization drive has proven to be a tragic irony: instead of delivering a just energy transition, it is systematically destroying the environment, violating the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and deepening the damage to an Earth already buckling under the weight of the climate crisis.
There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.
If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.
– Karl Jaspers
What’s the relationship between an emaciated, dying Wondiwoi tree kangaroo(whose small joey in her pouch is also condemned to death) and tooth decay or obesity in a kid in any European city? The world’s perhaps only fifty remaining Wondiwoi tree kangaroos are gorgeous marsupials with large eyes, sweet faces, thick burnt-umber coats, and strong claws for grasping tree branches. Human kids are also gorgeous creatures, often with large eyes, sweet faces, thick overcoats, and grasping hands (especially if there’s a KitKat in sight). But that’s the superficial connection. The underlying, truly dangerous relational bond is palm oil. Each individual, the cute animal and the cute kid, represents the horrors of an insane system of consumption that’s destroying everything it touches on both sides of the story, the kid’s and the tree kangaroo’s.
It’s no news that unhealthy items stack shelves at child-eye level in supermarket checkout queues. You’re waiting, have nothing to do but look at the last tempting offers, so you throw a couple of KitKats into your basket or buy one to quieten a whining kid. KitKats will sweeten your day. They also kill all sorts of beautiful rainforest creatures, and they displace and kill people who once lived on and with the land where their ingredients are now grown. If you buy cigarettes, the packet screeches, with ghastly illustrations, that you’re courting head or neck cancer, and that your smoking can cause fatal lung disease in nonsmokers. KitKat wrappers show no pictures of dying Wondiwoi tree kangaroos or caries in tender little mouths.
I’m singling out KitKats to represent the vast array of products made from palm oil and because it’s among several supposedly seductive products listed in a boycott recently called by more than ninety West Papuan tribes, political organisations, and religious groups. The other products and labels they name are Smarties, Aero chocolate, Oreo biscuits, Ritz crackers, Pantene, and Herbal Essences. But the boycott is about more than a few products that are damaging at both production and consumer ends of the scale. It’s about late capitalist corporate imperialism where industrialists lawlessly operate in boundless, rather than delineated parameters of space and time, aided by the global data (mis)information economy, which splatters its fraudulent spiel everywhere in worldwide linkups. Hence the connection of KitKat with a treeless, starving tree kangaroo.
After being betrayed by the United Nations more than sixty years ago, Melanesian West Papua, occupied by Indonesia ever since, is a particularly poignant case in point. In its increasingly militarised torture mode of governance, the Indonesian regime—now headed by Prabowo Subianto, notorious for his war crimes in East Timor—is the world’s biggest palm oil exporter, to the tune of 47 million tonnes of crude palm oil in 2023, and 54% of global exports. The industry accounts for 4.5% of Indonesian GDP and directly or indirectly employs 16.2 million people. The total area of Indonesian palm oil cultivation is about 25 million hectares (out of 29 million hectares globally, which amounts to approximately 6.7% of the size of the European Union), and plantations covering many million more hectares are planned. In 2023, industrial oil palm plantations in Indonesia expanded by 116,000 hectares, a 54% increase compared with 2022. The largest oil palm project so far is Tanah Merah, in Boven Digoel Regency. Seven companies control the area of 280,000 hectares of which more than 140,000 hectares of land traditionally occupied by the Awyu people will be taken for oil palm production.
In West Papua this destructive extractivism also entails violent social change for the country’s Indigenous peoples. It’s impossible to know how many people have been displaced in the name of “food security” (security for KitKat production) as the Indonesian government is understandably averse to providing statistics of the genocide it has been committing in West Papua for more than sixty years. The Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights calculates that there are between 60,000 and 100,000 internally displaced people. Mining, palm plantations, and logging by Indonesian and international companies are protected by the state transmigration programme which creates militarised buffer zones protecting the areas designated for Indonesian government “development” programmes. It’s calculated that Indonesian transmigrants outnumber West Papuans by about ten percent, and approximately 25% of the Indigenous population, or more than 500,000 people have been killed. Needless to say, the demographics represent atrocious human rights violations, including destruction of West Papuan languages and culture.
Taking rainforest land for palm oil monoculture also means taking water. In areas where these plantations are forcefully introduced, women are particularly affected. In West Papua and other parts of the world, they bring water to their villages for activities that sustain community social life and hence its reproductive cycle. When villages disappear with the land and the water, women suffer sexual violence when forced beyond the confines of their traditional safe territory to be exploited as cheap labour on plantations, or when they have to resort to prostitution in shantytowns in order to survive, in a chain of generalised abuse that includes sexually servicing uprooted men who are brought in and also exploited as cheap labour or (in the case of West Papua) as transmigrants.
Here’s an example of how a person eating a KitKat isn’t aware that he or she is also consuming the bravery and resistance of women forest guardians which, now mixed with sugar and trampled into the sludge of what was once rainforest, rots his or her teeth. In October 2023, dozens of women from the Tehit clans of the Afsya people in Kondo district, Sorong Regency, West Papua held an emergency meeting, where they shared and wrote down everything they knew about their community’s special places: where to find good sago, where to cultivate their crops, where to find medicinal plants, where their sacred places were, and all their deep connections with their habitat. But they can’t save this world of community solidarity because in 2014, the Indonesian government granted a concession of 37,000 hectares of what was then 96% intact rainforest to PT Anugerah Sakti Internusa, a subsidiary of the Indonusa Agromulia Groupwhich is owned by Rosna Tjuatja. Subsequent permits gave the company permission to start destroying 14,467 hectares within this concession area and plant millions of oil palm trees.
Meanwhile, Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto who, with a personal fortune of over $130 million and holdings of almost half a million hectares of land, poses as the great champion of planetary “food security”, says that palm oil expansion won’t deforest because “oil palms have leaves”. In fact, clearing forest for a palm plantation releases more CO2 than can be sequestered by growing oil palms on the same land. But the overriding message is that oil palms are fine because they have leaves and we need “indulgent products” that eat up rainforests to rot children’s teeth. Somehow, consumers swallow this rubbish with sweet junk in colourful wrappers. Nestlé, owner of KitKat (now with a KitKat cereal “designed to be enjoyed as an ‘occasional, indulgent’ breakfast option”) has recently fobbed off investor moves to reduce its high levels of salt, sugar, and fats, with an 88% shareholder vote in favour of said high levels. Nestlé, well known for its many human rights abuses, obtained this majority with the argument that any “move away from ‘indulgent products’ could harm its ‘strategic freedom’”. Strategic freedom, leaf-green and sweetly sugar-coated, to kill.
On the other side of the world, shoppers who are sickened by the slaughter of human kin and other animals, about the ravaging of Earth’s environments, can try to observe the West Papuan boycott by checking to see if products contain palm oil. But information overload is a form of lying, a way of bamboozling people, so palm oil is hidden in names like Vegetable Oil, Vegetable Fat, Palm Kernel, Palm Kernel Oil, Palm Fruit Oil, Palmate, Palmitate, Palm olein, Glyceryl, Stearate, Stearic Acid, Elaeis Guineensis, Palmitic Acid, Palm Stearine, Palmitoyl Oxostearamide, Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide-3, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Sodium Kernelate, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Sodium Lauryl Lactylate/Sulphate, Hydrated Palm Glycerides, Etyl Palmitate, Octyl Palmitate, Palmityl Alcohol, Laureth-7, Steareth-2, Cocamide MEA (fatty acid-derived) Cocamiede DEA (fatty acid derived), Stearamidopropyldimethylamine, Cetyltrimethylammonium chloride, Isopropylmyristate, Caprylic/capric Trigylceride, Fatty Isethionates (SCI), Alkylpolyglycoside (APG), and Laurylamine oxide. The large number of names behind which palm oil is hidden warns, in itself, what a destructive product it is. People can do their best to boycott these products, but any boycott also requires thinking about whether we actually need them, and how to overthrow the system that produces them, knowing how damaging they are, knowing how the profits are concentrated in ever smaller circles of greedy despoilers, and how these profits are plump with death and mayhem in societies we are supposed not to think about, unless in racist terms, let alone learn from them about their harmonious ways of living on this planet.
In its multifarious disguises, palm oil is everywhere, in about 50% of packaged products sold in supermarkets, from foodstuffs to deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste (for rotting teeth), makeup, “beauty” products (thus profiting from exploitation and control of women’s bodies), petfood, and biofuels. In other words, the question of the caries-producing KitKat is also a moral question because governments, political institutions, and the multinational companies they protect are lying to the people they are supposed to represent. Waivered so that corrosive, erosive and literally poisonous (in places like West Papua) food products can keep flooding markets, national and international legal provisions are facilitating the ruination of rainforests and their guardians. Hence, they are not legitimate. It’s pure madness. KitKats are unnecessary. Rainforests and their guardians are more necessary that ever in this age of climate catastrophe. The climate breakdown, “the severe and potentially catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change, including extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and widespread environmental degradation, often used in a context of urgency and alarm” is also a generalised moral breakdown that is accelerating the calamity from which no one will be spared.
Freedom from hunger is a basic human right. But there’s a difference between a hungry child whining for a KitKat in a western supermarket and people, hungry to the point of starvation, who have been displaced to ensure that supermarket shelves can be stocked with KitKats. A couple of dollars satisfy a child who wants a KitKat but nothing will fill the bellies of Indigenous peoples who are displaced from their customary lands, deprived of resources which, more than just filling their bellies, constitute their livelihoods, their culture, community values, and physical and psychological wellbeing. In the language of “development”, this way of life that respects the environment is presented as backward and discardable. So, in the Merauke district, in the name of “national food sovereignty” and supposedly green “renewable energy”, more than a million hectares have been chopped down in the last decade for monocrop oil palm plantations, with the result of massive food insecurity among the local Marindpeople, as anthropologist Sophie Chao describes. No longer able to harvest their traditional rainforest food—fish, game, fruits, sago, and tubers—they are now obliged to subsist on instant noodles, rice, canned foods, and sugary drinks, a diet which, closer to KitKats than forest nutrition, has led to, “Stunting, wasting, and chronic protein-energy malnutrition are particularly high among women and children, rendering them vulnerable to pneumonia, parasitism, bronchitis, and a range of gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal diseases” which are aggravated by “collective feelings of sorrow, grief, pain, and anger”.
Unlike KitKat-producing tree killers, the Marind people understand the rainforest as having a sentient ecology that is manifested in seasonal rhythms and the natural signs of the rainforest, its features, and its dwellers. Every change, every sign tells them about the health of the forest and suggests how to care for it by knowing which animals they should hunt and when, by using the appropriate tracks or river sections, and by harvesting the vegetation in season. This care for the forest’s health is reflected in their own wellbeing. It is a harmonious way of life.
The hungry child in a supermarket can be satisfied with a tooth-rotting treat but hunger for West Papua’s dispossessed Indigenous peoples also means destruction of whole “ecosystems, soils, and water that these plants and animals depend on to survive and thrive in mutual relations of eating and being eaten that operate across species lines”, as Sophie Chao writes. Eating in the rainforest has a social significance expressed in traditional hunting and gathering, food preparing, and consumption practices that feed more than human bodies because they nurture ties between individuals and groups. The fact that there some 250 tribes with their own languages may, for a western shopper in a supermarket (where people rarely speak to or even look at each other), seem to be primitive and hostile fragmentation. Far from it. This is a complex system of democracy, rules and agreements among tribes that has worked well for some 50,000 years. People, identifying with their own tribes and also as West Papuans, have always understood the rules of the system. Lawless junk foods that destroy and replace this intricate system have no social meaning except for being trash and trashing everything.
A kid crying for a KitKat in a supermarket feels only his or her imperious individual need for instant satisfaction. But among the Marind people, hunger is contagious because it’s a social malaise. If one person is weak and malnourished, the group feels undernourished and fragile in what Chao calls “a form of transcorporeal and affective transference”. In rainforest “communities of fate”, the contagion spreads beyond humans, the plants wilt when their biodiverse ecologies are fenced off, or they are poisoned with pesticides, fertilisers, and contaminated water, or chopped down, burned, and crushed by heavy industrial farming and military equipment. Tree kangaroos, wild pigs, cassowaries, and birds of paradise are enslaved or killed in the pet and feathers trade, fish are poisoned in contaminated streams, and when homeless creatures are adopted in an effort to protect them, they too pine away.
Chao gives a moving account of the fate of a cassowary called Ruben, hatched by villagers from an egg rescued from a deserted nest in bulldozed rainforest. She was sitting with a group of villagers enjoying an after-dinner conversation when, “During a momentary lull in the conversation, Ruben’s shy whistle echoed through the night. I smiled and commented on how sweet his song was, and how lucky we were to have such a cute pet among us”. Her friends immediately fell sad. One old woman explained how mistaken she was. “This is no song, sister. This is a weeping. This is the cry of the cassowary. Can you not hear the sadness, child? Does it not rip through your heart with the speed of a hardwood ngef (Arenga pinnata) arrow? We hear only a weeping, a lament. We feel the grief of the khei (cassowary) as it seeps through our skin and bone. We hear death and mourning in its call. No longer wild (liar) or free (bebas), the cassowary has become plastik (plastic).”
In this “more-than-human ecology of hunger”, the oil palm too is hungry (lapar)—and this is exactly how the Marind people describe it—but it is voracious and antisocial, not unlike a kid throwing a tantrum in a supermarket, except that it does far more damage by insatiably devouring the rainforest, all living things in it, its social life, its identities, and its cultures, turning even cassowaries into “plastic” things, and extending all the way to rotting the teeth of people who insouciantly consume its products on the other side of the planet. Territory-gobbling roads and towns are also lapar and the Marind people very well understand that the governments, corporations, and obscenely rich individuals that are fuelling their fires and machines with plants, animals, humans, and traditions as they go devouring everything that is beautiful, valuable, and meaningful around them, are greedy things contributing nothing but rot to the world. They know all too well that hunger is a political phenomenon. National food security discourse dictates which bodies and ecologies must be fodder (literally, biofuel), to produce junk food for others.
Greenwashing organisations like the World Wildlife Fund, established by dodgy characters like the racistDuke of Edinburgh and Nazi-linked, leading man of the Lockhart bribery scandal, Prince Bernhard of Holland, as an elite club of an anonymous thousand-plus richest people in the world, influencing global corporate and policy-making power, and “setting up ‘round tables’ of industrialists on strategic commodities such as palm oil, timber, sugar, soy, biofuels and cocoa”, argue that oil palm boycotts aren’t “helpful”. No, of course they aren’t helpful for WWF funders, among them Coca-Cola, Shell, Monsanto, HSBC, Cargill, BP, Alcoa, and Marine Harvest. This pretence that there are sustainable solutions for the sugary rot of KitKat, is yet another smokescreen (obscuring everything like sooty clouds rising from burning rainforest to the extent of even halting air traffic) to hide the fact the West Papuan call for a boycott of KitKat and other palm oil products is a profoundly moral stance, challenging western consumption practices and all the lies underpinning them.
The names of many oil palm products, reveal how they lie (Nature’s Bounty, for example) and that they are nearly all “indulgent” (Pampers, for example). Lists might be boring but some names should be mentioned to show how the wreckage of most of what is good about human existence is wreaked by more than just a few useless, “indulgent”, corruptive products. They involve food retailers and companies like Aldi, Booths, Ocado, Spar, Monde Nissin, Vbites, Mitsubishi, Eat Natural, Nature’s Bounty (ultimately owned by Nestlé), Thai Union, Food Heaven, Almond Dream, East End Foods, Müller, Koko; drinks companies like Redbush Tea Co, Healthy Food Brands, SHS Group, Nichols, R. White’s, Fruitshoot; coffee shops including Soho Coffee Company, Caffè Nero, Caffè Ritazza, Coffee Republic, AMT Coffee, Esquires, Harris and Hoole, Muffin Break, Boston Tea Party, Puccino’s, and Bewley’s; fast foods, among them Leon, Domino’s Pizza, Yo! Sushi, Burger King, Yum! Brands (Pizza Hut, KFC), Itsu, Subway, Greggs, Pret A Manger; restaurant chains like Wahaca, TGI Friday’s, Giraffe, Mitchells and Butlers (Harvester, All Bar One), Greene King. Whitbread, Pizza Express, The Restaurant Group (Chiquito, Frankie and Benny’s, Wagamama), Azzurri (ASK), Jamie’s Italian, Colgate-Palmolive and Nestlé getting the worst ratings; perfumes like Holland and Holland (Chanel perfume), Shiseido Company Limited (Dolce and Gabbana perfume), Inter Parfums (Jimmy Choo, Karl Lagerfield, Oscar dela Renta, Paul Smith, Gap, Banana Republic perfumes), Pacifica, Bliss, L’Occitane, Coty (Max Factor, Wella, plus perfumes for Adidas, Burberry, David Beckham, Calvin Klein); Natura Cosmeticos (Aesop), Suntory (F.A.G.E), Wahl, The King of Shaves, Lansinoh (Earth Friendly Baby), Baylis and Harding, Koa (John Frieda, Molton Brown), Crystal Spring, PZ Cussons (Morning Fresh, Original Source Charles Worthington, Imperial Leather), WBA Investments (Boots, No7, Soap and Glory, Botanics), Tom’s of Maine, Superdrug, Midsona (Urtekram), Laverana (Lavera), Logocos (Logana, Sante), Li and Fung (Vosene, Clinomyn toothpaste), Church and Dwight (Arm & Hammer, Pearl Drops, Arrid, Batiste), Revlon (Revlon, Almay, Mitchum), Bull Dog, Clarins, Edgewell (Banana Boat, Wilkinson Sword, Carefree, Bulldog Skincare for men), and Holland and Barrett; and cleaning products including Mcbride (Frish, Surcare, Planet Clean, LimeLite), The London Oil Refining Co Ltd (Astonish), Enpac (Simply), Lilly’s Eco Clean, Active Brand Concepts (Homecare), WD-40 (1001), Jeyes (Jeyes, Bloo, Sanilav, Parozone), and Procter and Gamble (Fairy, Head and Shoulders, Pampers, Always).
Rainforests are essential for the planet and all life on it. The ethical reach of the West Papuan boycott has the same scope as Karl Jasper’s insight about the all-embracing nature of metaphysical guilt, because the rot in a child’s teeth resulting from capitalist consumption practices is tangible and often painful evidence of the rot throughout the whole system that peddles—as essential for human wellbeing—commodities that kill wondiwoi tree kangaroos, kill people, kill planet Earth, and where life, in the plans of the richest men, will be confined to the “strategic freedom” of “indulgent”, “intelligent” bunkers.
Christian Solidarity International’s statement against expanded land exploitation and military occupation provokes reaction from government of Indonesia
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, March 28, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — The indigenous peoples of West Papua face renewed threats to their land rights, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) warned at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 28.
In an oral statement delivered during the 58th Session, CSI’s Abigail McDougal recalled that since assuming office last fall, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had announced a revival of the government’s transmigration program to settle non-indigenous people in the province of West Papua. In addition, he had authorized the creation of two million hectares of new rice and sugar plantations, and a 50 percent increase in production capacity at the region’s Tangguh liquid natural gas facility.
“These projects threaten not only the third largest rainforest in the world and one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but also the land that the indigenous peoples of West Papua call home,” CSI’s Deputy Director of Public Policy and Communications stated. According to Amnesty International, the resulting environmental degradation would pose an “existential threat to the people of West Papua.”
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“These projects threaten not only the third largest rainforest in the world and one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but also the land that the indigenous peoples of West Papua call home.”
Abi McDouga
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The planned projects would entail an increased military presence in West Papua, which has been subjected to military occupation for decades. This “is particularly concerning,” McDougal said, “as Indonesia’s parliament last week amended the country’s military law, removing checks on the military’s power.”
West Papua is the easternmost region of modern-day Indonesia. While Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, the indigenous peoples of West Papua are almost completely Christian
West Papua was made a colony of the Netherlands in 1898, and was administered separately from Dutch-ruled Indonesia. It was only handed over to Indonesia in 1962, thirteen years after Indonesia became independent. This decision provoked widespread protests and an independence movement that continues until today.
With more than 79,000 West Papuans already internally displaced by military operations, protecting Papuans’ land ownership is an urgent imperative, McDougal said.
The UN’s 2021 Durban Declaration and Program of Action on combatting racism calls on states “to ensure that indigenous peoples are able to retain ownership of their lands and of those natural resources to which they are entitled under domestic law,” she recalled.
“Christian Solidarity International calls on the government of Indonesia to halt its transmigration program in West Papua, protect indigenous land rights, and allow international rights monitors to enter the region,” McDougal concluded.
The Indonesian delegation responded to CSI’s statement during the general debate, stating that they “reject the allegation that the Indonesian people in the six provinces of Papua are subjected to…discrimination” and pledging to “continue dialogue with all stakeholders, including with the local communities, to ensure their voices are heard.”
Reacting to the Indonesian delegation’s reply, CSI’s Director for Public Advocacy, Joel Veldkamp, said, “There could not be a greater contrast between the Indonesian government’s assurances at the Human Rights Council, and what we hear from our friends in West Papua – that Indonesian government-led projects cause them to fear for the very survival of their people.”
“We reiterate our call to the government of Indonesia to halt its destructive campaigns in West Papua.”
About CSI
Christian Solidarity International is an international human rights group campaigning for religious liberty and human dignity.
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Joel Veldkamp Christian Solidarity International +41 76 258 15 74 email us here
CSI at the UN: Indonesia must protect indigenous land rights in West Papua
Australia West Papua Association Adelaide 