Excavators have begun clearing land in the Indonesian region of Papua in what’s been described as the largest deforestation undertaking in the world.

A total of 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of forests, wetlands and grasslands in Merauke district will be razed to make way for a cluster of giant sugarcane plantations, part of the Indonesian government’s efforts to boost domestic sugar production.

Five consortiums, consisting of Indonesian and foreign companies, are confirmed to be participating in the 130 trillion rupiah ($8.4 billion) project, with roles ranging from developing sugarcane plantations and processing mills, to building the power plants to run them.

At least one of the companies, PT Global Papua Abadi (GPA), has already seeding its concession, with President Joko Widodo, better known as Jokowi, planting the first seeds in a ceremony on July 23.

“I see that the land here is flat and there’s plenty of water. I think this is an opportunity to turn Merauke into Indonesia’s food barn,” the president said at the ceremony.

Satellite monitoring by technology consultancy TheTreeMap has detected large land clearings inside GPA’s concession since June 2024. Using alerts data from Nusantara Atlas, a forest monitoring platform run by TheTreeMap, the organization found at least 356 hectares (880 acres) of forest cleared during that time.

This is contrary to the government’s claims that it will mitigate the environmental impact of the sugarcane project by avoiding forested areas as much as possible. Senior officials have also claimed there’s not much natural forest left in Merauke in the first place.

“There’s no forest in the middle of Merauke,” said the country’s energy minister, Bahlil Lahadalia, who’s in charge of a government task force that manages the project. “There’s only eucalyptus [trees], swamps and savannas.”

TheTreeMap founder David Gaveau said it’s true the ecosystem in southern Merauke, where the project is located, consists of savanna and grassland, but there’s also closed-canopy evergreen forest there, making it unique.

Besides the revelation of natural forest being cleared in the sugarcane project area, some parts of the project area also appear to fall inside a zone that the government has declared should be protected under a moratorium program.

The moratorium, introduced in 2011 and made permanent by President Jokowi in 2019, bans the clearing of primary forest and peatland that hasn’t yet been allocated for plantation or logging concessions. Under the moratorium, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry publishes a map that shows which areas are protected by the moratorium. This map is revised every six months.

The Pusaka Foundation, an NGO that works with Indigenous peoples in Papua, overlaid a map of the sugarcane concessions with the moratorium map and found that 30% of the concessions, 145,644 hectares (359,894 acres), are located within the moratorium zone.

While the figure might not be accurate since the concession maps used in the analysis are in JPEG format rather than shapefiles, the finding still indicates that there’s natural forest left standing in the project area, according to Pusaka Foundation director Franky Samperante.

“Therefore, this project poses environmental risks, particularly in the form of increasing greenhouse gas emissions [from deforestation],” he said.

Savanna and grasslands

The rest of the land that’s been cleared for the sugarcane project is savanna and grasslands of the Trans Fly ecoregion, Gaveau said.

Spanning 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres), the Trans Fly ecoregion is one of the most extensive lowlands on the island of New Guinea, where Indonesian Papua is located, and home to some of the largest and healthiest wetlands in the Asia-Pacific region.

Its savanna and grasslands resemble the landscape of northern Australia, which lies to the south. While they don’t resemble the tropical rainforest that cover most of the island, the savanna and grasslands still comprise an important ecosystem that’s home to unique plant and animal species, many of which are rare or threatened, such as the dusky pademelon (Thylogale brunii) and the Fly River grassbird (Megalurus albolimbatus).

More than half of New Guinea’s total bird population is found in the ecoregion, including 80 species endemic to the island.

“Regionally, the Trans-Fly is very rich in bird fauna and no other site in the region compares to it, including Kakadu World Heritage Site [in Australia’s Northern Territory],” UNESCO wrote in its description of the ecosystem.

That makes protecting the Trans Fly savanna and grasslands from deforestation essential for maintaining biodiversity, activists say. Any failure to do so will also be catastrophic for the climate and derail the Indonesian government’s target of curbing deforestation rates, said Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of U.S.-based advocacy group Mighty Earth.

And much of the sugar produced from the Merauke project won’t even be used for food, he pointed out: the government plans to develop sugarcane-derived bioethanol as part of its transition away from fossil fuels.

“Simply put, it is a disaster,” Hurowitz said. “The tragedy is that this project would also single-handedly undermine Indonesia’s greatest climate success: reducing the rate of commodity deforestation by an amazing 90%. I hope that President Jokowi, incoming President Prabowo, and Minister of Environment and Forestry Siti Nurbaya will examine the project to see if the companies involved are actually delivering on its purposes — or are instead breaking the government’s legal commitments.”

Indigenous communities sidelined

Besides deforestation, there are also concerns that the rights of Indigenous Papuans will be violated in the process as they continue to be sidelined from consultation on the project.

“Has [the government] asked Papuans whether they want to plant sugarcane or not?” Faisal Basri, a prominent economist at the University of Indonesia, said at a seminar in June. Faisal, a vocal critic of government policies he deemed unjust, passed away in early September from illness.

In his remarks in June, he cited the example of a similar megaproject in Merauke, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), initiated by Jokowi’s predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in 2011 to turn the district into the “future breadbasket of Indonesia.”

The MIFEE project was earmarked for rice and sugarcane plantations to shore up national food security — the same justifications being touted by Jokowi administration officials today. Yet the project turned out to be a failure, used as cover to establish oil palm and pulpwood plantations instead. The MIFEE project also became a “textbook land grab,” activists say. Under the project, companies acquired large swaths of Indigenous lands without the free, prior and informed consent of communities, and without providing adequate compensation.

This should be more than enough reason for the government to scrap the sugarcane project, Faisal said. He also questioned the wisdom of imposing an industrial agricultural model on the lands of a people who for generations have lived as hunter-gatherers.

“They have a different culture. In the past, [the government] tried planting rice in Merauke as well, and it failed because there’s no anthropological or sociological study [to determine what Indigenous Papuans want],” he said. “This is because Papuans are considered to not exist. The mindset [of development] is Java- or Jakarta-oriented.”

GPA, the sugarcane company, said it’s committed to be transparent and actively involve Indigenous communities in the project by mapping the concession together with them. This participatory mapping effort is necessary to identify which parts of the concession overlap with ancestral lands, according to GPA surveyor Ikrar Bakti.

“We want to make sure that Indigenous peoples have a broad understanding of the size of their ancestral lands that will be managed by the company, and how the management will be carried out with sustainability principles,” he said as quoted by local media.

But as long as Indigenous Papuans don’t get to decide by themselves how to manage their own lands, then there’s no meaningful participation and consent given by the communities, according to Frederika Korain, a human rights lawyer from Papua. She singled out Bahlil, the investment minister, who identifies as Papuan after having spent much of his childhood there, for usurping the voice of native Papuans.

“It’s very easy for the minister to come and earmark [lands] as he pleases,” Frederika said at the June Seminar with Faisal. “Let me ask him, where do you have your ancestral right in [Papua]? Where did your ancestors live? You’re not Papuan, so how can you come [to Papua] and declare this region a place for investment?”