Can Indonesia produce more food without deforestation?

JAKARTA - Indonesia's government hopes an initiative to turn millions of hectares of land, including forests and peatlands, into farmland will reduce the world's fourth-most populous nation's reliance on food imports to feed a booming population.

Food estates, or large-scale commercial plantations to raise strategic crops, are at the centre of the plan that environmentalists warn will require razing trees and ancient peatlands that store vast amounts of planet-heating carbon dioxide and exacerbate the climate crisis.

Here's what you need to know about Indonesia's ambitious food estate initiative.

Why does Indonesia need to increase food security?

Dependent on imports of commodities like rice, corn, sugar and wheat, Indonesia ranks 63rd out of 113 countries in the Economist Impact think tank's 2022 Global Food Security Index.

The production of the main staple of rice has plateaued in recent years at 31 million tons in 2023. Rice imports jumped to 3 million tons in 2023 from 305,000 tonnes in 2017 to feed a fast-growing population of 270 million people, according to government figures.

President Prabowo Subianto campaigned last year on a pledge to make Indonesia self-sufficient in its supply of food by 2028.

What is the food estate programme?

Introduced by his predecessor Joko Widodo, the food estate programme plans to convert 20 million hectares (49 million acres) of forests and peatland into farmland across Indonesia to produce rice, cassava, corn, sugar and other staples by 2027. That is roughly a tenth of Indonesia's total land area.

In 2020, the government launched a pilot project in Central Kalimantan, setting aside more than 1 million hectares of land for rice, corn and cassava.

Only 47,000 hectares had been planted by 2023, according to the Agriculture Ministry.

About 64% of the total area planned for the food estates is protected peatland, according to Indonesian environmental NGO Pantau Gambut.

Subianto plans to invest 124 trillion rupiah ($7.5 billion) this year for agriculture technology and infrastructure.

In 1995, the Mega Rice Project, a precursor to the food estate programme, converted 1 million hectares of peat swamp in Borneo for rice production. It was abandoned four years later, because a large portion of the land was unsuitable for rice cultivation.

What are the environmental impacts?

Activists from organisations like Greenpeace say the programme ignores the concerns of local farmers and Indigenous communities and threatens nature in the process.

A 2019 study found that the burning of 4,761 hectares of peatland for the Mega Rice Project emitted an estimated 173,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into atmosphere annually.

Indonesia has the second-largest tropical peatland after Brazil, with 21 million hectares across Sumatra, Borneo and Papua that store approximately 57 gigatonnes of planet-heating carbon.

Already, deforestation and land-use change are major sources of greenhouse gases in Indonesia, with forests and peatland loss in the past two decades releasing an average of 1 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, according to non-profit group Climate Action Tracker.

Globally, draining peatlands emits an estimated 1.9 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, or 5% of global anthropogenic emissions.

How can Indonesia's food production better protect nature?

The government has said farmland will be developed on formerly logged areas and non-forestland to avoid deforestation.

Authorities have said they plan to work with China to develop a new type of rice and other crops suitable for the soil and to use strategies so that trees and crops can grow together.

Researchers and activists argue that the government should instead focus on strengthening food distribution, technologies to help farmers boost production and regenerative methods to maintain soil and crop quality.

(Reporting by Adi Renaldi; Editing by Ayla Jean Yackley)