Indonesian CSO Pusaka offer insight into grassroots-level impacts to encourage the EU to use the EUDR and other trade instruments to help.
Despite the political upheaval surrounding the EU Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR), civil society in producer countries hope that such trade rules may encourage outside oversight and pressure, offering help in redressing fraught situations where domestic protests have earned them only attempts at intimidation. Twenty-two Indonesian NGOs, including Pusaka, recently alerted the EU Commission to the need, when benchmarking Indonesia’s deforestation risk, to assess that risk as red-hot “high” in Papua. Whether trading in agricultural commodities or critical minerals, they urge EU decisionmakers to carefully consider the production costs imposed on Indonesian citizens.
Indonesia systematically prioritises commercial over community interests – a situation legally entrenched in the Omnibus law to promote investment and job creation (FW 253; FW 259) and its secondary legislation. Although the central government is responsible for mapping out and protecting Indigenous Peoples’ customary lands, for instance, it has no interest in doing so, and has not. Typically, therefore, Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) lack legal title to their ancestral lands, and courts are largely unwilling to hear claims.
As a result, land conflicts across Indonesia are far from rare; currently some 4000 land disputes are underway, as generational lands are seized to make way for commercial operations and National Strategic Projects (NSP) – a designation that streamlines commercial permitting processes and sweeps aside all manner of protections (FW 290). Many IPLCs are losing their homes and their way of life is disrupted, even destroyed.
This is certainly true in Papua.
Pusaka is a grassroots CSO working to help communities in Southern and Western Papua, and in Jayapura to the north, to prepare documentation and map customary lands to obtain official recognition, at least by local government. Pusaka support communities in cases of land-grabbing and agrarian conflict, most of which are related to palm oil concessions. They view the EUDR as an opportunity for outside pressure that could help tip the scales and protect IPLCs, especially where situations likely meet the criteria for raising substantiated concerns under EUDR Article 31.
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Sorong Regency, Southwest Papua Province: In 2008, palm plantation company, Inti Kebun Sejahtera (IKSJ) obtained a permit from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to operate on 4000 hectares primary forest in the Moi Segen Salawati Indigenous group’s customary land; the concession was expended in 2012 to 19,655.35 ha, again on Moi lands. Deforestation has continued after the EUDR cut-off date (136 ha destroyed in 2021, 407 ha in 2022, and 339 ha in 2023). From the outset, the company’s operations sharply divided the community between those who accept IKSJ’s presence, but were misled about the terms of the contracts they signed in return for minimal compensation, and the Klagilit Laburu clan who, from the beginning, have rejected the company’s encroachment on 786 ha of their territory. In recent years, Pusaka are working with both groups, to address contractual discrepancies with the former, and to help the Klagilit Laburu contest evictions and oppose the destruction of their ancestral homes with the Regency.
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Jayapura Regency, Papua: In the Namblong Peoples’ customary lands, PNM company obtained a permit in 2014 to clear 30,920 hectares of primary forests for oil palm: without FPIC, and despite protests. They did nothing for years, and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry revoked the permit in early 2022 for inactivity. Without a permit, PNM began cutting forests in 2022 – again, after the EUDR cut-off date – intending to create 30,920 hectares of oil palm plantations. The project is now clearing forests in Grime Nawa in fits and starts: stopping when the Namblong protest, awaiting their departure, firing up the heavy machinery afterwards. (In similar cases, rather than enforcing the violation, the Ministry of Environment has offered the palm companies the option to change the commodity to ‘carbon’). Today, more than 50 ha have been destroyed, scarring the landscape and dividing the community between some who received payments, and others, with whom Pusaka is working to stop the destruction and seek legal remedy in the courts. Meanwhile, the oil palms are drying out the local river, so locals must go farther for water; the animals they hunt have fled. The entire valley ecosystem has been disrupted: the dry season is longer and dryer, and the rainy season more unpredictable.
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Merauke Regency, Papua: Pusaka is investigating a tremendous project, Merauke National Strategic Project, in southern Papua that encroaches on four Indigenous Peoples’ customary lands; it merits much closer EU scrutiny. In early 2024, the Central government took the unusual step of creating a Task Force “to accelerate” only this, and no other project; they later assigned five additional military battalions to the area. The Task Force chief (coincidentally, the Minister for Investment) observed the area at the height of rainy season, declared it “empty and unproductive”, and then announced the destruction of two million hectares of primary forest and peatland – half the regency territory – to create food estates (sugar, sugarcane bioethanol, rice fields; commodities not caught by the EUDR) and related infrastructure. Deep concerns surround whether the cleared timber (caught by EUDR provisions) is entering the EU market. Also notable, is that the businessman in charge of the estate and several others linked to the sugarcane projects are owners of oil palm plantations, prompting many to wonder if the commodity will later be switched. By December 2024, 11,000 ha had been cleared.
These are only a few examples of the devastation that is being forced on Indonesian communities and ecosystems. Pusaka and other Indonesian NGOs want the EU to know the unacceptable human costs often associated with Indonesian palm oil, timber, nickel for electric vehicles …. They hope that the EUDR, bilateral trade deals, and the Critical Minerals Regulation can serve as levers to encourage greater transparency and civil society participation, and to insist on respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and human rights.
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Image: Pusaka
Categories: News, Forest Watch, Partner Voices, Critical minerals, EU Regulation on deforestation-free products, Indonesia