A recent report published by Greenpeace and TheTreeMap made a damning conclusion: about 3.1 million out of the 16.4 million hectares of oil palm plantations in Indonesia fall within forest estates, including national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and UNESCO sites. The report further details that of that 3.1 million hectares, approximately 1.6 million are industrial plantations, claiming that this illustrates a “catastrophic failure of law enforcement to protect the forest estate.”
The report brings us back to our own geospatial analysis of Riau and Central Kalimantan while working with SIIA on the Haze Outlook 2021, although our interest lies more in the Indonesian government’s ambitious project to set up food estate programmes across the archipelago. While the exact locations of these programmes are still relatively unknown, the maps below show that much of the land of the districts earmarked for food estate projects consist of either peatland or areas protected areas recognised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and/or under moratoriums prohibiting the conversion of forest land into commercial plantations.
As experts and environmental groups continuing to play the role of the watchdog to the government, it would be interested to see how the focus would shift to food estate programmes. With organisations like Tempo and The Gecko Project revealing damnatory information, including attempts allegedly made by Defence Minister and head of the food estate project Prabowo Subianto to steer the project to a politically connected company, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more reports like the one published by Greenpeace and TheTreeMap—albeit more focused on food estate programmes—making headways into the news.