'Pig Feast': The Film Jakarta Doesn't Want You To See

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In Merauke, conglomerates such as Jhonlin Group, owned by Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, alongside PT Global Papua Abadi, PT Murni Nusantara Mandiri, KPN Corp and First Resources Group, have emerged as the dominant actors on the ground. PT Global Papua Abadi alone is targeting annual production of 2.6 million tons of sugar and 244 million liters of bioethanol.

To support the government's 1 million-hectare rice estate project in Wanam, Ilwayab District, Jhonlin Group has imported large quantities of heavy machinery from Chinese manufacturer SANY Group.

By the end of 2024, hundreds of excavators had reportedly arrived at the ports of Wanam and Merauke. Even more strikingly, the project's road infrastructure is being built with mining tailings supplied by PT Freeport Indonesia, illustrating the tight integration of Indonesia's extractive industries.

This alliance of capital has grown even more entrenched through the active involvement of the military in securing and implementing projects on the ground. The establishment of PT Agro Industri Nasional by Indonesia's Ministry of Defense in 2020 - staffed largely by retired military officers and political figures - signaled the deepening involvement of defense institutions in the business of food security.

Under the supervision of the XVII/Cenderawasih Regional Military Command, the armed forces have assumed oversight roles in land-clearing operations. Indonesia's military commander has also inaugurated five“buffer battalions” for conflict-prone areas, including Infantry Battalion 804/Dharma Bhakti Asasta Yudha, stationed directly in Merauke.

The deployment of thousands of armed troops has generated an atmosphere of intimidation that suppresses critical voices among Indigenous communities. As a result, the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) has effectively been discarded in favor of accelerating capital accumulation along Indonesia's eastern frontier.

Shadow of the palms

The environmental transformation unfolding in South Papua carries devastating sociological consequences for the Indigenous Marind people. In Marind cosmology, as explored by Sophie Chao in her 2022 book“In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua,” humanity is not understood as separate from nature.

Marind existence is woven through intimate relationships with non-human entities within the forest, particularly the sago palm (Metroxylon sagu), regarded as an ancestor (amai) or sibling (namek). These spiritual kinships are sustained through bodily intimacy, symbolized through concepts such as wetness (dubadub) and skin (igid). The dense and humid sago forest is where social life itself flows and regenerates.

Palm oil, by contrast, is perceived by the Marind as a destructive and selfish entity. The crop is described as something“always hungry, without friends or family,” because of its massive extraction of groundwater and its destruction of surrounding ecosystems. Monoculture oil palm plantations are viewed as lifeless spaces, silent landscapes where traditional navigation and social orientation become impossible.

The disappearance of customary forests has triggered profound social and psychological trauma, manifested through collective nightmares among residents of Khalaoyam village. Many dream of their bodies being invaded by oil palms, with sharp palm thorns protruding from their muscles like bayonets and palm fruits growing beneath their skin like malignant tumors.

This social disintegration has been intensified by the arrival of new cultural practices brought by transmigrants and industrial workers. Packaged instant foods such as instant noodles and biscuits are referred to by Indigenous communities as“plastic food” because they do not naturally decompose like sago.

Consuming such food is seen as severing bodily ties to ancestral land, a gradual degradation of identity that unfolds alongside the growing sale of customary land under short-term economic pressures. Within these spaces of compromise and ambivalence, social fragmentation between clans has become increasingly unavoidable.

Rhetoric of backwardness, erasure of sovereignty

The dispossession of customary land in South Papua does not operate solely through physical coercion. It is also sustained through narratives and cultural representations produced by outside actors.

In her 2016 book“Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea,” anthropologist Paige West argues that racialized representations are frequently deployed by transnational capitalism to justify developmental inequality.

When journalists, developers and international conservation institutions portray remote Indigenous communities as societies“living in the past” or“pre-capitalist,” they systematically delegitimize local knowledge systems and facilitate land dispossession.

Within Melanesian agrarian politics, accusations that Indigenous communities“lack capacity” are often used by international organizations and large corporations to take unilateral control over environmental compensation funds and land registration systems. A similar pattern is unfolding in South Papua.

Government officials and business consortia routinely frame Indigenous Papuans as lacking the agronomic or technological capabilities needed to manage wetlands and forests productively. This discursive construction of“backwardness” becomes the justification for stripping away customary rights, ignoring genuine consent and paving the way for industrial-scale bulldozers.

Highways as territorial spears

Physical infrastructure in Papua's interior has never functioned purely as an instrument of civilian welfare. Rather, it also operates as a mechanism of military penetration and territorial conquest.