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View all search resultsWhen Indonesia's development leads to destruction
The country still has time to choose between pursuing the current extractive course to benefit the few or changing course toward equitable development to benefit the many, but the clock is ticking.
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A man walks over a pile of logs and debris next to a damaged home on Dec. 5, 2025, in Geudumbak village, Langkahan district, North Aceh, after a flash flood on Nov. 26 swept them into areas along the Arakundo River Basin. (Antara/Syifa Yulinnas)
W
hen a president owns nearly 100,000 hectares of pulpwood plantation in the center of a region devastated by floods that have killed hundreds of his country’s citizens, he cannot plausibly claim to be leading the country out of an environmental crisis. He is part of the crisis.
President Prabowo Subianto’s deep entanglement with forest concessions undermines any legitimacy he seeks in addressing the very disasters his policies and interests helped enable.
Prabowo publicly boasted owning 500,000 ha of forest concessions in a televised presidential debate against Anies Baswedan, even correcting the rival candidate for citing a lower figure of 300,000 ha, perhaps with a tone of offended pride.
Among the concessions linked to him is that of PT Tusam Hutani Lestari, which controls 97,000 ha upstream of the disaster area in Central Aceh, one of the worst affected regions by last month’s catastrophic floods.
For years, investigative reports by the Gecko Project, the Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam) and various media have documented Prabowo’s ownership stake. He has never once denied it.
It is little wonder that his now-infamous declaration, “We should plant more palm oil, because it is also a tree”, has become a symbol of either profound ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation of Indonesia’s ecological realities.
Yet the country’s crisis extends far beyond Prabowo’s plantations or his ideological blind spots. Indonesia is sprinting toward an imagined future without laying the foundations needed to support it. The government highlights grand numbers, global forums and gleaming megaprojects while the ground continues to collapse beneath the nation.
![Volunteers ready packages of relief aid for flood-affected areas on [DATE], at the Sidoarjo Disaster Mitigation Agency in East Java.](https://img.jakpost.net/c/2025/12/06/2025_12_06_169905_1764954727._medium.jpg)
