Indonesia stops a three-million-hectare forest clearing plan for rice

Indonesia will halt a programme to clear three million hectares of forest for new rice paddies, climate envoy Hashim Djojohadikusumo said on Tuesday. The reason he gave was self-sufficiency. In 2025 the country produced 34.71 million tonnes of rice, against annual demand of 31.19 million tonnes. The strategic reserve stood near 5.3 million tonnes. With those stocks, he said, the government would stop opening new land and would try to raise yields on fields that already exist, using better seed.

Hashim is President Prabowo Subianto's brother, and he speaks for the climate file as well as for this reversal. The clearing plan was launched in 2024, in the first year of Prabowo's term, as a food-security project on a scale that alarmed forest ministries and outside buyers of Indonesian commodities. Three million hectares is about the size of Belgium. Not all of it had been cut. The announcement is a stop order on the programme, not a claim that the full area has been restored.

The production figures need a plain reading. A surplus of about 3.5 million tonnes in one year, plus a reserve of 5.3 million, is a buffer against a bad monsoon and against the price spikes that have unsettled Indonesian politics before. It is not a permanent surplus. Rice output swings with El Niño, with fertiliser supply, and with the planted area in Java, which still grows the bulk of the crop. A decision taken on a strong 2025 can be reopened after a weak 2027. Hashim's wording ties the halt to the present balance, not to a statute that would bar new clearing.

What replaces the bulldozers, on his account, is intensification: superior seed, and higher yield on existing paddies. That is a different budget. Clearing forest is a land and migration project, often in Kalimantan or Papua, with roads, ditches and new villages. Seed and extension sit with the agriculture ministry, and they fail if the seed does not match the local water regime or if farmers cannot buy the fertiliser that the new variety expects. Indonesia has run intensification drives before. The yield gain is real on research plots and uneven on outer-island fields that were themselves cut from forest a generation ago.

The climate arithmetic is the other ledger. Peat and primary forest cleared for rice release carbon that a paddy does not put back. Indonesia's international partners have paid, through various funds, for reduced deforestation. A 2024 plan to open three million hectares cut across those deals. A 2026 halt puts the government back on the side of the deals, at least on paper. Buyers of palm oil and pulp will ask whether the same land, refused to rice, is offered to another crop. Hashim's statement, as carried by AFP, does not answer that. It answers rice.

Prabowo's political stake is food prices in the cities. A reserve of 5.3 million tonnes is the stock Bulog, the state logistics agency, can release if the Jakarta retail price jumps. Stopping the clearing does not fill that warehouse. The 2025 crop did. If 2026 plantings fall short of 31.19 million tonnes of demand, the halt will be described as premature by the same office that announced it. The envoy has chosen the current surplus over the option on new land.

The open question is the hectare that was already marked and not yet cut. A stop order needs a list of concessions, a ministry that will cancel them, and a penalty if a local government keeps clearing. None of that was in Tuesday's announcement. Until those cancellations are published, the three million hectares remain a programme that has been declared over, not a map that has been withdrawn.