I refer to an article in the Sept. 13 edition of The Jakarta Post on the
Papuan proposal to develop 500,000 hectares of land in the Merauke
region. The project, which is part of a massive private sector-driven
1.6-million-hectare food and energy estates program, demonstrates again
the total lack of knowledge of the land cover, soils and land
suitability of the areas. Even the forestry and agriculture ministries
seem unsure whether there is peat land or natural forest in the areas.
The central government, through the transmigration program, assisted by
the World Bank and the UK government spent 12 years between 1980 and
1992 and hundreds of millions of dollars surveying the land suitability
for agriculture and settlement of the whole of the archipelago.
The local and international teams were surveying and mapping the natural resources in the Merauke region.
Judging by comments from the local administration and from potential
investors in the proposed projects, the existence of this information on
the natural resources of the area is unknown, or if known, has clearly
been ignored.
The 4.7 million hectares of land in Merauke does have some agricultural
potential, especially for rice. Irrigation for the rice fields can come
from the waters of the large number of major rivers that traverse the
area — the largest of which is Digul, which has an average discharge of
1,500 cubic meters per second.
There are also hundreds of thousands of hectares that are not suited to
dry land food cropping or plantations because of frequent flooding, or
because the topography is too undulating or hillocky, or there are
serious soil constraints.
South of the Digul the forest is, in fact, very open
woodland-cum-grassland dominated by Melaleuca spp., a fire and flood
resistant tree that holds very little interest for commercial timber
companies. There are large peat swamps and mangrove forests to the west
of the Digul estuary toward the land of the Asmat and Timika, but these
are extremely remote and isolated and unlikely to pose any attraction to
land developers because of the total lack of infrastructure and the
nature of the peat itself — acidic and generally highly infertile.
The natural resources of Papua, including Merauke, are in relatively
pristine condition and the remoteness of the province, combined with the
very low level of infrastructural development within the province, goes
a long way to explaining this fact. Conditions are unlikely to change
in the short-term, but with its huge mineral resources, infrastructure
improvement will occur and spearhead further mineral development, and
possibly the opening up of the interior to commercial forestry and
agriculture.
Papua has to prepare its provincial and district spatial plans instead
of producing “pie-in-the-sky” plans for huge schemes that are based on
little or no accurate information, which will end in failure. Do not
assume that investors would be so foolish as to invest in such
ill-prepared projects.
David E. Parry
Jakarta
