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Papua food estate project risks turning into conflict hot spot

The government's approach to national food security needs a paradigm shift to an inclusive approach that embraces indigenous stakeholders and their centuries-old knowledge in sustainable resource management, so that development can benefit all Indonesians across the country's diverse communities and natural ecosystems.

Martin Dennise Silaban (The Jakarta Post)
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Yogyakarta
Wed, December 18, 2024

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Papua food estate project risks turning into conflict hot spot A tractor operates on March 5, 2021, at the site of a forest that has been cleared for a government project in Gunung Mas regency, Central Kalimantan. (AFP/Galih)

T

he government’s ambitious food estate project in Merauke, Papua, has become a flash point of tension, once again highlighting the continuing conflict between state-led development agendas and indigenous land rights.

Heralded as a national food security initiative, the project is fiercely opposed by the Malind, Makleuw, Yei and Khimaima indigenous communities through rights group Solidaritas Merauke. Their opposition is not merely an act of defiance, but a desperate attempt to preserve their cultural identity, traditional land and the ecological balance they have sustained for generations.

Central to this resistance are the communities’ women, who serve as both custodians of tradition and stewards of natural resources. Their voices reveal the human cost of the project: “Where will we get our food? Our land is destroyed.” This lament encapsulates the fear, frustration and loss experienced by these indigenous peoples, whose lives are inextricably tied to their land. For them, the food estate project is not just an economic threat: It is an existential one.

The food estate project epitomizes the state’s long-standing tendency to oversimplify complex social and ecological systems in pursuit of control and efficiency. James C. Scott, in his groundbreaking book, Seeing Like a State (1998), criticizes this approach as a hallmark of high modernism, an ideology that relies on scientific and technical expertise to design sweeping, top-down interventions.

Such an approach aims for uniformity and scalability, often at the expense of local diversity and knowledge.

In the case of the Merauke food estate project, the government envisions a vast swath of monoculture rice fields as a panacea for the nation’s food insecurity. However, this approach ignores the region’s ecological complexity and indigenous communities’ invaluable knowledge.

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These communities have developed sustainable practices for managing their resources over centuries, rooted in their deep understanding of the local environment. This form of practical, adaptive knowledge, which Scott calls “metis”, stands in stark contrast to the rigid, bureaucratic frameworks imposed by state planners.

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