January 19, 2024 at 2:00 AM ET
By converting 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of land that environmental groups say is mostly peatland into rice, corn and cassava fields, the government expects it will become self-sufficient in food. Laws protecting forests have been amended to allow the project being implemented. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in November, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said his country wanted to become a global supplier of agricultural products and feed populations beyond its borders.
But disrupting peatlands comes with devastating and likely irreversible costs to the climate, environmental experts and campaigners say.
“Restoring these vast tracts of peat forests that have been destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and money,” said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. Do we have to do it according to the timetable set by world leaders for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? “Almost impossible,” Taylor said.
Peatlands form in areas that are too wet for dead plants and animals to fully decompose. While peatlands make up only 3% of the Earth's surface, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, according to the United Nations.
When peatlands are drained, layers of ancient biomass exposed to oxygen-rich air decompose at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from past eras into the atmosphere.
Worse still, when the weather gets hot, the unprotected peat dries out and becomes flammable. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more intense forest fires. Last year, according to data from Global Forest Watch, the number of fire alerts in Central Kalimantan province exceeded those recorded in the previous three years combined.
Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the Food Estate project will succeed. Research shows that tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops. Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and Walahi, said they had documented widespread crop failure in areas targeted by the government project. Rice grown in some peat-rich areas yielded less than a third of the yield of rice grown on mineral soils, according to the clusters' analysis.
Rwanda Wande Tuturong, a senior aide to Widodo, said the government was experimenting with ways to farm peatlands more effectively but could not wait for a perfect solution. He said global supply chains are under threat, citing the Covid-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
“The challenge we face is real,” Tuturong said in the capital, Jakarta. “This project needs to continue.”
While peatlands are also found in temperate regions, including in the United States, Russia and the British Isles, it is tropical lands that are of greatest concern, because they tend to be more forested, absorb more carbon, and decompose at a lower temperature. At a faster pace, according to the researchers.
Wetlands in Africa's Congo Basin, relatively undisturbed until recently, are being divided into oil and gas concessions. New roads and infrastructure are disrupting the river system that floods the lowlands of the Peruvian Amazon.
Activists in other countries point to Indonesia as a cautionary tale. In 2015, massive fires across Indonesia's degraded peatlands released more greenhouse gases than the entire European Union over several months, amounting to what the United Nations called “one of the worst environmental disasters of our century.” “. The fires covered Southeast Asia with dense fog. It caused the premature death of more than 100,000 people, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University.
If left intact, peatlands will be naturally protected against fire. However, once they decompose, they produce an inferno that is difficult to extinguish because they can travel underground, feeding on yards of dried biomass below the surface.
Last year, when an El Niño weather pattern pushed temperatures to record highs, fires again broke out across Indonesia. The worst-affected areas included many villages participating in the Food Estate programme, monitoring groups said.
In Bintok Jaya, a Spartan village of about 1,500 people in Central Kalimantan that lies almost entirely on peatlands, Village head Mohamed Ibrahim, 35, said that the fires burned from July to October and spread on lands that the government had cleared and cultivated in recent years. Rows of trees with black trunks stretch alongside the cobblestone roads of Bentok Jaya. “We were putting out the fire at night, and by the next morning, the fire was burning in the same place,” Ibrahim said.
Belang, another village located on peat-rich land, escaped the fires until mid-November, when land cleared for the food project caught fire. “I kept thinking to myself: ‘What if it doesn’t stop?’” recalls Sintok Ratu, head of the village’s volunteer firefighting group. “What if he destroys everything?”
The fires were eventually extinguished thanks to heavy rains. But they will come back, Rato said. “They always do that.”
History of peat destruction
Even before the Food Estate project, Indonesia's peatlands were deteriorating faster than almost anywhere else, the result of government mistakes dating back decades, according to peatland experts.
From 1995 to 1998, Indonesian dictator Suharto led a project to cultivate nearly 2.5 million acres. To drain Kalimantan's wetlands, more than 2,000 miles of canals were dug, many of them so wide that they are still visible from airplanes decades later. A group of visiting European researchers said at the time that it would take centuries for the ecosystem to recover. “The destruction of peatlands is an irreversible process,” they warned.
The massive rice project failed to reach its production goals and was terminated after Suharto's ouster. But large fires have repeatedly broken out in peatlands cleared for the project, according to the World Resources Institute, a global research group. Even as the Indonesian government spent billions fighting the fires, it encouraged the rapid growth of the pulpwood and palm oil industries, further damaging peatlands.
Immediately after the 2015 fires, Widodo established a peatland restoration agency and promised to halt the clearing of new peat bogs. That agency says it has since restored about 9 million acres of peatland, but peatland experts and environmental groups say that number has been impossible to verify.
Authorities did not say specifically where the restored peatland areas were located. Monitoring groups say the government has inflated its success and adopted a narrow definition of restoration as making drained peatlands wet again, although this is only part of fully rehabilitating a damaged ecosystem. Professor Taylor said he had not seen any examples of damaged peatlands in Indonesia that had been fully restored. Researchers at the World Resources Institute said the same thing.
The Peatland Restoration Agency did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2020, when Widodo launched the food real estate project, scientists pointed to the failure of Suharto's initiative. But government researchers have discovered new, more resilient crop varieties and made advances in plant science that should lead to different outcomes, officials said. “The peatland conservation model is completely different,” Nazir Fouad, head of the Peatland Restoration Agency, told reporters at the time.
However, three years later, local communities say the government's efforts have been mixed at best.
People in Bintok Jaya had struggled for decades to grow crops in peat bogs, and they thought when excavators showed up in 2020, help had finally arrived, said Ibrahim, the village leader. But in the last two seasons, much of the rice grown has not flowered or produced much less grain than locals expected. Ibrahim said the land cleared by the government was too much for local residents to handle, and at least a third of it had been abandoned. “Politicians come and look at the rice fields and say: 'Good, good,'” he added. “But people know that's not good.”
In the village of Gunung Mas, several hours away, Pantau Gambot documented more than 1,700 acres that had been cleared for cassava plantations and left to wither.
In Belang, where satellite images analyzed by Pantau Gambot show the food estate program has cleared more than 700 acres of peat forest, unused bags of fertilizer and agricultural lime powder have piled up on street corners. Village officials said government contractors cleared the land and held short workshops on rice cultivation before they abruptly left. Some local farmers have surrendered.
The Indonesian Financial Audit Board said after an investigation in 2022 that the Food Estate project failed to adhere to environmental regulations stipulating “sustainable planning of food farmlands and agricultural farming systems.” However, Widodo promised to move forward.
The government has not revealed the amount of peatland that has been bulldozed so far for the project. But monitoring groups say more land is set to be cleared, including peat swamps, in Central Kalimantan as well as on the island of West Sumatra and in the East Papua region.
Indeed, the Global Peatland Initiative found two years ago that Indonesia's peatlands were responsible for more global greenhouse gas emissions than any other peatland system in the world.
On a recent afternoon, Tao, a 72-year-old woman wearing a hijab and muddy clothes, walked along a plot of land in Belang where she said she had tried and failed to grow rice several times. She added that officials promised to establish irrigation canals and walking paths. “But they didn’t,” Tao said under her breath. Instead, a barren wasteland stretched out in front of her.
The village chief of Belang, known as Rusli, said he did not know whether the government project would succeed or not. Many here belong to the indigenous Ngaju ethnic group, which has lived in harmony with Kalimantan's peatlands for centuries.
“We have our own local wisdom,” Rosli said. He said the Ngajo believe that when the peatland ecosystem is disturbed, its trees cut down and the swamps drained, the land will remain barren, and fires will retaliate.
Dera Minra Segaga in Central Kalimantan and Wenda Sharmila in Jakarta contributed to this report.
