By Radio Free Asia
INDONESIA’s military is taking a leading role in plans to convert more than 2 million hectares of wetlands and savannah into rice farms and sugarcane plantations in a part of the conflict-prone Papua region that conservationists say is an environmental treasure.
The military’s involvement has added to perceptions it is increasingly intruding into civilian areas in Indonesia and prompted a warning it will bring bloodshed to Merauke, the region slated to become a giant food estate. It’s an area of easternmost Indonesia that has largely avoided violence during the decades-long armed conflict between Indonesia and indigenous Papuans seeking their own state.
The plans are part of the government’s ambitions for the nation of 270 million people to achieve food and energy self-sufficiency. They highlight the tension globally between the push for economic development in lower-income countries and the protection of the diminishing number of pristine ecosystems.
Taken together, the sugarcane and rice projects for Merauke represent at least a fifth of a 10,000 square-kilometer lowland known as the TransFly that spans Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Its name comes from the Fly River – a squiggle on the otherwise straight line on the map that marks the border of the two countries on the island of New Guinea.
The great expanse of wetlands, grasslands and pockets of tropical rainforest in the south of the island is “globally outstanding,” said Eric Wikramanayake, a conservation biologist who wrote about its significance for a book on conservation regions in Asia.
Researchers say it is home to half of the bird species found in New Guinea including about 80 that exist nowhere else and other endemic animals such as the pig-nosed turtle and cat-like carnivorous marsupials. The World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, has called it a “global treasure” and a proposed World Heritage listing says no other place in the region compares to it, including the famous Kakadu national park in northern Australia.
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