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Indonesia is developing vast agricultural holdings across the archipelago, an area 10 times the size of neighboring Singapore, to counter the country’s dependence on imported food, President Joko Widodo said Wednesday.
The project, which will eventually cover nearly 800,000 hectares (two million acres), is preparing the land to grow rice, cassava and corn for the world’s fourth most populous country, Widodo said at a televised cabinet meeting.
The announcement will enrage environmental groups, who have warned that such projects primarily exploit peatland areas and fuel forest fires blamed for the seasonal haze that has suffocated much of the region for the past two decades.
Widodo said the project would “anticipate the global food crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic … also to anticipate climate change, as well as to curb our dependence on imported food.”
The initial phase has already started in North Sumatra, as well as in central Kalimantan, on the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo.
Eventually, it may spread to three more regions in the world’s largest archipelago: South Sumatra, Papua, and East Nusa Tenggara.
However, the project has its critics.
Earlier this month, Greenpeace Indonesia warned that converting carbon-rich peatlands into giant farmland could cause an environmental catastrophe.
“Since 2015, more than a quarter of a million hectares of peat forest have been burned in Central Kalimantan,” he said.
“While the scientific community urges us to protect all peatlands to stop climate change, the government is instead backing a plan that appears destined to turn this land into another carbon bomb.”
dsa / fox
