SOUTH WASILE, Indonesia — Rudy said South Wasile district police officers visited his home with PT Arumba Jaya Perkasa staff three times in June to recommend he take the company’s 20,000 rupiah offer, around $1.22, per square meter of his coconut grove. “But I didn’t want to do that,” Rudy, whose name has been changed, told Mongabay Indonesia. The officer, Rudy said, prohibited recording the interaction in Loleba village here on Halmahera, a once-remote island in North Maluku province that today is the site of a nickel mining boom to feed the global energy transition. In a statement to Mongabay Indonesia, South Wasile district police denied any involvement in whether local residents should agree to contracts of sale. The 20-year mining permit held by PT Arumba Jaya Perkasa covers 1,818 hectares (4,492 acres) of forest and community plantations in the interior of Loleba village, according to Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. It is just one of “hundreds of extractive mining company concessions” operating in North Maluku province, according to Transparency International, a nonprofit. PT Arumba Jaya Perkasa is paving a dedicated haulage road and building a small harbor in the inlet piercing Halmahera Island from the northeast. Swaths of coconut and nutmeg groves planted long ago by families in Loleba, Saramaake and Talaga Jaya villages are being razed for mining infrastructure. In Loleba village, many farmers resisted the land use change while feeling squeezed by below-market-value offers for land, which were based on valuations assessed by the local…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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