Indonesia’s President Prabowo confuses palm oil plantations and rainforests

“Oil palm is a tree, it has leaves, right?”

Indonesia’s president, Prabowo Subianto, gave a speech in the Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) on 30 December 2024, in Jakarta. He starts by contrasting western neoliberalism where the government is “only a regulator and a referee” and the market drives the economy.

Indonesia’s economy, Prabowo says, is “a combination of the best of the free market, capitalism, and the best of the planned economy.” The government is the protector of the people, a leader, pioneer, a manager of the economy. “The government must maintain all the wealth of the Indonesian nation,” he says.

As we might expect from an ex-army general, Prabowo has a lot to say about the need for the government to “protect our people”. Part of this, Prabowo says, is that, “Our people must have enough to eat . . . we must be self-sufficient in food.” This is “the basis of sovereignty” Prabowo says.

Food self-sufficiency?

Prabowo mentioned food self-sufficiency in his inaugural speech on 20 October 2024. He has appointed Zulkifli Hasan (who was Minister of Environment and Forestry from 2009 to 2014) to a new ministry, the Coordinating Ministry for Food Affairs. Prabowo says Indonesia can become food self-sufficient in four to five years.

The government plans to increase the area of agricultural land by at least four million hectares by 2029.

Indonesia’s food estate programme, launched by then-President Widodo in June 2020, aims to create large-scale agricultural plantations across the country, including more than one million hectares of cassava plantations.

Prabowo was Defence Minister at the time. An investigation by The Gecko Project and Tempo in 2021 revealed that the Ministry of Defence was playing a key role in the food estate programme.

Further research, by environmental NGOs Pantau Gambut and WALHI Central Kalimantan, together with BBC News Indonesia, revealed that three years into the programme there were no rice or cassava crops to be harvested, and no farmers working in the fields. Large areas of forests had, however, been clearcut — supposedly to make way for the agricultural crops.

In 2024, land clearing started on a plan to establish two million hectares of sugarcane plantations in Merauke district in Papua. The US$8.4 billion project is the world’s largest deforestation programme.

“I see that the land here is flat and there’s plenty of water. I think this is an opportunity to turn Merauke into Indonesia’s food barn,” then-President Widodo said at a ceremony to plant the first seeds on 23 July 2024.

About 30% of the sugarcane concessions are within areas declared as protected under a moratorium introduced in 2011, and made permanent in 2019.

Indigenous communities living in the project area have not been consulted.

“We also have to increase oil palm plantations”

At the end of his recent speech in Jakarta, Prabowo talks about oil palm plantations. “Many countries expect too much from Indonesia,” he says.

“Especially they really need our palm oil. It turns out that palm oil is a strategic material. Many countries are afraid of not getting palm oil, imagine. So take care of it, yes, regents, governors, officials, soldiers, police, take care of our palm oil plantations everywhere, they are state assets.

“And I think in the future we also have to increase oil palm plantations, don't be afraid of endangering, what is it called, deforestation, right? The name of the oil palm is a tree, right, right? Oil palm is a tree, it has leaves, right? It releases oxygen, it absorbs carbon dioxide, where did we get accused of that, right? Those people are the only ones who are confused . So we are fine, we don't need to . . . Even they were confused when they wanted to talk about restricting us, Europe wanted to restrict us, now they are confused. I said, oh thank you, we won't sell to you, thank you I said. They are panicking right now. Later their entire chocolate industry will be in chaos, right, making chocolate is partly from oil palm, detergent, cosmetics, they are confused themselves.”

The audience laughs when says, “Oil palm is a tree, it has leaves, right?”

But confusing rainforests with industrial tree plantations is not funny. It’s an argument that apologists for destroying rainforests and replacing them with monocultures have used for decades.

On the same day that Prabowo told us that oil palms have leaves, the new forest minister, Raja Juli Antoni, announced that, “We have identified 20 million hectares of forests that can be utilised for food, energy, and water security.”

Plantations are not forests

In October 2003, World Rainforest Movement published a collection of articles titled, “Plantations are not forests”. (Full disclosure, I wrote some of the articles.) The report starts as follows:

Planting trees can be very good, but it can also be very bad. It all depends what you’re planting them for, the scale and site of the plantations and the impacts or benefits they bring to local populations. Large-scale plantations (consisting of either fast-growth trees such as eucalyptus and pines or of other species such as oil palm) generate most negative impacts, both in social and environmental terms.

WALHI (the Indonesian Forum for the Environment) points out in a press release that the Ministry of Environment and Forestry stated in 2022 that oil palm is not a forest tree. Uli Arta Siagian, WALHI’s National Executive Forest and Plantation Campaign Manager comments that, “This shows that President Prabowo’s statement is not based on data and facts published by the government itself.”

WALHI is also concerned about Prabowo asking the police and soldiers to guard oil palm plantations. “The fact is,” WALHI notes, “that the police and soldiers tend to side with companies that have land conflicts with communities. It is not uncommon for security actors to intimidate, commit violence, and criminalise communities in conflict with companies in the palm oil plantation sector.”

When Prabowo became president in October 2024, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry was renamed as the Ministry of Forestry.

Shortly after that, the Ministry of Forestry also got a new logo. The previous logo is on the left and the new logo on the right. The new logo looks suspiciously like an oil palm: