Jakarta (AFP)
Indonesia will create large farms across the archipelago - as large as 10 times Singapore - to fight the country's food dependency and curb food imports, President Joko Widodo announced on Wednesday.
For this project, which could cover up to 800,000 hectares, land will be developed to grow rice, cassava and corn and feed the population of this country, which is the fourth most populous in the world, assured Mr. Widodo at a government meeting.
For the Indonesian president, this project should make it possible "to anticipate the global food crisis which should be caused by the Covid-19 epidemic (...) but also climate change, while reducing our dependence on food imports ".
The preliminary phase has already started in the north of the island of Sumatra, but also in central Kalimantan, in the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo.
The project could eventually be extended to three other regions of the archipelago: South Sumatra, Papua and the eastern islands of Nusa Tenggara.
This announcement should arouse the ire of environmental organizations, which have already warned that this type of project mainly exploits peatland areas and encourages forest fires implicated in the appearance of clouds of smoke that have seasonally suffocated much of the region for the past 20 years.
Greenpeace Indonesia has warned that converting carbon-rich peatlands into giant farms could cause environmental disaster.
"Since 2015, more than a quarter of a million hectares of peatlands and forests have burned down in central Kalimantan. And while the scientific community urges us to protect all peatlands to stop climate change, the government is arguing on the contrary a plan that could turn these lands into a new carbon bomb, ”the association said.
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