The Indonesian administration of President Prabowo Subianto is pushing ahead with a multibillion-dollar plan to build a vast string of plantations in South Papua province that it hopes will secure domestic supplies of rice as well as sugarcane, as the government seeks to ramp up production of biofuel as a means of weaning itself off foreign sources of oil. In mid-October, state-owned construction company PT Hutama Karya won a contract worth 4.8 trillion rupiah ($286 million), the biggest public tender so far this year, to build an 80-kilometer (50-mile) stretch of highway linking the coast of South Papua to the interior. In early August, the deputy energy minister, Yuliot Tanjung, said building the food estate as well as the initial infrastructure of the bioethanol supply chain would cost $8 billion. The plans include a bioethanol factory in South Papua, which will start operating in 2027, as well as sugar factories and a 120-megawatt power station. In May, the government appointed state-owned company PT Agrinas Pangan Nusantara to run the food estate, with funding for the project coming from the holding company for state-owned enterprises, Danantara. Dating back to the 1990s under former president Suharto, food estates have appealed to multiple administrations since then as they flex the country’s resources and scarcely populated regions such as Kalimantan and Papua to secure supplies of food like rice in order to limit imports. Dictated from far-off Jakarta, the food estate initiatives have invariably faltered as lofty ambition collided with on-the-ground realities like soil…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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