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Scientists Warn Indonesia's Rice Megaproject Faces Failure (science.org) 43

Posted by msmash from the according-to-the-science dept.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto's ambitious plan to create 1 million hectares of new rice farms in eastern Merauke Regency faces strong criticism from scientists who have warned it will fail due to unsuitable soils and climate. Military "food brigades" are currently guarding bulldozers clearing swampy forests in Indonesian New Guinea for the project, which aims to boost food self-sufficiency for the nation's 281 million people.

Soil scientists warn that Merauke's conditions could lead to acidic soils unable to support economically viable rice farming, potentially resulting in abandoned fields vulnerable to wildfires. "Farmers will get no profit at all," said Dwi Andreas, a soil scientist at Bogor Agricultural University who tested 12 rice varieties in similar soils with poor results.

The initiative mirrors past failed megaprojects, including a 1990s attempt to convert 1 million hectares of Borneo peatlands to rice paddies and a 2020 onion and potato farming expansion in North Sumatra that saw 90% of fields abandoned. A previous 2010 attempt to expand rice farming in Merauke also failed, destroying forests that Indigenous Papuans relied on and increasing childhood malnutrition, according to anthropologist Laksmi Adriani.
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Scientists Warn Indonesia's Rice Megaproject Faces Failure More

Scientists Warn Indonesia's Rice Megaproject Faces Failure

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  • Indoor farming is the way to do this. Use solar powered LED grow lights. No pesticides. Any insects who dare wander into any grow layer via the ventilation system or entrance passageway get zapped with a laser. The crop yield will be insanely high per acre once the tech matures.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by greytree ( 7124971 )
      This is what gets rated "Insightful" on Slashdot in 2025.

    • Rice cannot be economically farmed in a hothouse or hydroponically. As for the take on pest management... no, it doesn't work like that.

      • 100% False. Rice can be grown hydroponically, and is being done economically.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com]

        https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com]

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        Maybe try fact checking before spouting speculation?

        • Emphasis on the "economically" portion. I actually looked at it in detail for northern Thailand and Laos about 6 years back, specifically comparing it to slash and burn practices common in those places. Hydroponics solved a lot of problems with water use and gave more consistent results, but costs were optimistically 40% higher without subsidies. I assume the economics in Indonesia are comparable.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        Bullshit it can't be done. I did it back in the early 2010s using NFT channels and grew it with absolute ease at very little cost. The hard part is actually maintaining the high humidity levels needed. You need a special building for that.

        • Where, and little (capital) cost compared to SE Asia slash and burn agriculture? My data might be skewed by low capital availability and essentially zero cost of water or labor from when I looked at it, but at the time it was 40% higher than flooded paddies.

    • Indoor farming is the way to do this. Use solar powered LED grow lights. No pesticides. Any insects who dare wander into any grow layer via the ventilation system or entrance passageway get zapped with a laser. The crop yield will be insanely high per acre once the tech matures.

      The economical (and presently only) way of doing "indoor farming" is actually to install wooden stakes in a field to hold up a translucent plastic tarp. This keeps out pests, allows the area to be heated (more) efficiently, and allows the direct utilization of sunlight.

      Rice could be able to benefit from vertical farming, which depending on the number of layers, could radically reduce the amount of land needed. However, presently this is still this is still not economical and conditions will have to become r

    • This post might have made more sense if you posted it 4 days ago. That would have been clever. Today, it's just dumb.

    • There are few countries that can afford the massive capital expenditure to do this and Indonesia isn't one of them. Millions of people are still burning animal shit for fuel because it's what they can afford. This type of infrastructure wouldn't be used for rice or anything similarly cheap either. That'll be grown outdoors even after this technology becomes widely available. It's arguably already here if you look at the kind of operations that are used to produce various plant-based drugs. High yield rice i

  • Due to over-fishing, jellyfish are filling the niche left open from vertebrate fishing, so they are plentiful and many species edible.

  • Don't plants crave it?

    • Brawndo is undoubtedly acidic. According to TFA the land is already acidic. So they need either limestone which will release CO2 as it neutralizes the acidity, or they could use lime where the CO2 has already been releases during the calcining process.

      If the land is a suitable swamp for rice then it's mostly likely too wet for most other crops. It's too hot for cranberries, they like acidic swamps. I'm not coming up with other options. Tropical land has famously poor soil, all the rain has leached away the

  • Want self-sufficiency? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vbdasc ( 146051 ) on Saturday April 05, 2025 @03:14AM (#65283041)

    Then work to reduce your population. 281 million for a country the size and natural conditions of Indonesia is insane and is an ecological disaster by itself.

    Same for Bangladesh, Nigeria and many, many other countries.

    • Re:Want self-sufficiency? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Whibla ( 210729 ) on Saturday April 05, 2025 @05:44AM (#65283131)

      Then work to reduce your population. 281 million for a country the size and natural conditions of Indonesia is insane and is an ecological disaster by itself.

      In terms of population density, Indonesia ranks 84th in the world. In fact its population density is just over half that of the UK (150 people / km^2 as opposed to 286 people / km^2), and considerably less than, for example, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Singapore...

      In fact, given the nature of the country, it's probably more capable of feeding itself, a la bounty of the sea, than many others. And, I strongly suspect, very few people posting here are in any position to criticise Indonesia or Indonesians in ecological terms. Corporatism / Capitalism and our conspicuous consumption are far more 'worthy' targets for that.

      Same for Bangladesh, Nigeria and many, many other countries.

      Can't really argue about Bangladesh, but Nigeria isn't exactly an outlier either (255 people / km^2).

      • Re:Want self-sufficiency? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Saturday April 05, 2025 @08:36AM (#65283233)
        Population density doesn't seem like a very useful measure in it's simplest form. Look at Canada, or Russia for that matter. The populations are concentrated in small areas, and the vast majority of the country(s) is just rocks and trees. Aren't we looking for arable land?

        I think you should take the amount of arable land and divide by the population and you'd get a more accurate picture of the problem.

        • Population density doesn't seem like a very useful measure in it's simplest form. Look at Canada, or Russia for that matter. The populations are concentrated in small areas, and the vast majority of the country(s) is just rocks and trees. Aren't we looking for arable land? I think you should take the amount of arable land and divide by the population and you'd get a more accurate picture of the problem.

          But, but ... how would that give me that frisson of rebel excitement of blaming "capitalism"?!?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Whibla ( 210729 )

          Population density doesn't seem like a very useful measure in it's simplest form. Look at Canada, or Russia for that matter. The populations are concentrated in small areas, and the vast majority of the country(s) is just rocks and trees. Aren't we looking for arable land?

          I think you should take the amount of arable land and divide by the population and you'd get a more accurate picture of the problem.

          In fairness that's a good point, but I wonder if you're not mistaking how much food can be sustainably taken from forests, let alone the sea. Or, unfortunately, the point that much current arable land was once forested. To my mind a large part of the problem is in treating 'efficiency', particularly economic efficiency, as the preeminent concern, or allowing corporations, domestic or multinationals, to do this. It's this that's led to the industrialisation of fishing and farming, and the widespread destruct

      • very few people posting here are in any position to criticise Indonesia or Indonesians in ecological terms. Corporatism / Capitalism and our conspicuous consumption are far more 'worthy' targets for that.

        Sorry but it's socialism that has done the worst ecological disasters. The Aral Sea is now the Aral Desert, the rivers that provided Central Asia fertile steppes are now small polluted streams, and the land is too salty for any productive use.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Whibla ( 210729 )

          very few people posting here are in any position to criticise Indonesia or Indonesians in ecological terms. Corporatism / Capitalism and our conspicuous consumption are far more 'worthy' targets for that.

          Sorry but it's socialism that has done the worst ecological disasters. The Aral Sea is now the Aral Desert, the rivers that provided Central Asia fertile steppes are now small polluted streams, and the land is too salty for any productive use.

          Quite apart from the fact that there are a multiple economic paradigms besides a binary choice between capitalism and socialism, you've omitted the hole in the ozone layer, the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest (and others), the widespread use of leaded petrol, global ice-melt, plus dozens of others, from your list of the 'worst' ecological disasters. None of which are down to socialism, but instead are because of ignorance, greed, corporatism and unregulated global capitalism.

          But hey, you carry

          • Where did I claim that only capitalism and socialism exists? And while you're right that other massive ecological disasters exist, ruining the whole of Central Asia with a single megaproject is, by far, the biggest damage done by a single instance of human ignorance. Not even greed, just pure stupidity: after soviets ended Lysenkoism (which cost them decades of research and lives of thousands of scientists), they moved to their next political idea. And this kind of agricultural project was one of favouri

    • It's sad you were marked troll for that, when AGW is expected to reduce food production and these nations can't feed their people as it is. A lot of the planet is going to become a lot less reasonably habitable because of the increased energy in poster-child-level-chaotic weather systems that always have the potential to wipe out crops.

    • Indonesia, along China, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, etc. dump the majority of plastic pollution into rivers and then into the Pacific ocean.

      Scientists complaining about converting forests to farmland again, instead of pressuring the world's largest plastic polluters to reduce plastic pollution....

    • Population reduction is a tough policy to campaign on though. "Vote for me and I'll get rid of a lot of you!"

  • This is part of Indonesia's population relocation program "Transmigrasi". It is funded by the UN. The only thing it has been successful at is ethnic strife resulting in bloodbaths.

  • The joys anti-science presidents and they sycophants keep giving are unending!

  • . . . has a rather horrible record, as well as population relocation.

    Zimbabwe, North Korea, China (Great Leap Forward), and Russia (Holodomor) have all tried it.

    Sri Lanka recently tried a gentler approach - to force all farms to go organic - which was disastrous.

  • For the Indonesian government, the success of this project will not be measured in the amount of rice paddies successfully and sustainably planted.

    Instead the goals are:

    1) Good domestic press

    2) Java-driven development of eastern Indonesian resources and infrastructure

    3) Military and police expansion into West Papua

    --- Good Domestic Press ---

    The Indonesian government under Prabowo has instituted wide-ranging austerity. Cuts to government services, layoffs of government employees, and reductions in government

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