When a president owns nearly 100,000 hectares of pulpwood plantation in the centre of a region devastated by floods and landslides that have killed hundreds of his own citizens, he cannot plausibly claim to be leading the country out of environmental crisis. He is part of the crisis. President Prabowo Subianto’s deep entanglement with forest concessions undermines any legitimacy he seeks in addressing the very disasters his policies and interests help enable.
Prabowo has publicly boasted that he owns 500,000 hectares of forest concessions. In the nationally televised presidential debate, he even corrected Anies Baswedan, who cited a lower figure of 300,000 hectares, with a tone of offended pride. Among the concessions linked to him is PT Tusam Hutani Lestari in Central Aceh, one of the regions worst hit by the recent catastrophic floods. The company controls 97,000 hectares upstream of the disaster area. For years, investigative reports by the Gecko Project, JATAM, and various media outlets have documented Prabowo’s ownership stake. He has never once denied it.
It is little wonder that his now-infamous declaration: “We should plant more palm oil, because it is also a tree”, has become a symbol of either profound ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation of Indonesia’s ecological realities.
Yet the country’s crisis extends far beyond Prabowo’s plantations or his ideological blind spots. Indonesia is sprinting toward an imagined future without laying the foundations needed to support it. The government highlights grand numbers, global stages, and gleaming megaprojects, while the ground continues to collapse beneath the nation, literally, in the form of drowned villages and landslide-scarred hillsides, and figuratively, in the erosion of social protection and ecological stability.
The problem becomes even more apparent when one looks at poverty data. According to BPS, the proportion of Indonesians classified as poor fell to 8.47 percent in March 2025, or about 23.85 million people. Yet the World Bank, using an internationally comparable standard, estimated in 2024 that more than 60 percent of Indonesians were poor. This vast discrepancy raises serious questions about what these numbers are measuring, and whether the state’s preferred statistics obscure the real vulnerability experienced by tens of millions. When the very metrics used to evaluate progress diverge this sharply, it becomes difficult to trust claims of success. At minimum, Indonesia needs a credible, independent data authority; dual poverty reporting that includes both BPS’s national line and the World Bank’s global line; and transparent auditing of poverty, labour, and welfare statistics. Without trustworthy data, even the best-intentioned policy becomes guesswork, and public trust erodes further.
Meanwhile, the human reality hidden behind statistical optimism remains unchanged. In August 2025, 7.46 million Indonesians were unemployed, and tens of millions more are stuck in precarious informal work. These are households unable to absorb even a single shock, a failed harvest, a lost job, or the kind of climate disaster that now arrives several times a year. The floods and landslides that devastated Sumatra and surrounding regions in late 2025 killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands. These were not simply acts of nature but the predictable consequences of decades of land-use decisions that stripped forests, drained peatlands, constricted river basins, and allowed plantations and mines to expand unchecked.
Indonesia lost roughly 32 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2024, much of it in places where commercial concessions proliferated faster than environmental oversight. Forests that once buffered storms, stabilized soil, and stored water have become fragmented or erased entirely, replaced by monocultures and mines that accelerate runoff, erosion, and ecological collapse.
Prabowo’s insistence on achieving 8 percent GDP growth only intensifies the underlying risks. Without major improvements in technology, productivity, or human capital, none of which Indonesia has yet secured, rapid growth typically comes from aggressive extraction of land and resources. The easiest path to “8 percent” is more plantations, more mining, more megaprojects, and more concessions for the connected few. This raises headline GDP while deepening inequality, weakening resilience, and pushing environmental and social costs downward.
A different path is possible, but it requires Indonesia to rethink its development model from the ground up. First, it must halt the conversion of land in areas most responsible for mitigating disaster. This means an immediate moratorium on new concessions in critical upstream watersheds, mandatory watershed risk assessments for all existing concessions, and strict accountability for companies whose land clearing or drainage contributes to floods and landslides. Degraded forests should be restored through community-based management, which has consistently been shown to reduce fires, improve biodiversity, and support rural livelihoods more effectively than corporate concessions. If disasters are being driven by policy choices, then the restoration of ecological buffers must become a central policy priority.
Second, the state must reorient national spending away from showpiece megaprojects and toward investments that actually improve quality of life. It is far more beneficial to repair schools, clinics, irrigation systems, and local roads than to build new toll highways or a prestige capital city. Nusantara itself deserves a full, public viability audit: environmental, fiscal, and social. If the costs outweigh the benefits, as growing evidence suggests, the nation must be willing to pause or abandon it and redirect the funds toward clean water, public healthcare, rural electrification, and climate adaptation infrastructure. These are the investments that allow families to survive shocks and escape poverty.
Third, inequality cannot be reversed without addressing the concentration of wealth and power. Indonesia needs a genuinely progressive tax system: higher taxes on large estates, land banks, inherited wealth, and under-taxed conglomerates. Social protection programs must be expanded significantly so they function not as emergency relief but as permanent stabilizers. Labour protections must be strengthened, reversing the most damaging elements of the Job Creation Law to ensure fair contracts, decent wages, and the ability to organize. Rising GDP means little if the benefits continue to flow upward.
Fourth, corruption must be confronted where it does the most damage: at the intersection of public money, political campaigns, and land concessions. Restoring the independence and investigative authority of the KPK is essential. Public procurement should be fully transparent, with all tenders and contract payments traceable online. In parallel, Indonesia needs a public registry revealing the true beneficial owners of companies, especially those receiving concessions, subsidies, or government contracts. Only by exposing and restraining the networks of political-business patronage can the country prevent megaprojects from becoming vehicles for enrichment rather than development.
Finally, Indonesia must prepare for the climate shocks it can no longer avoid. A national flood-defense plan is urgent, starting with the regions already suffering the most. This requires restoring mangroves, expanding river buffers, constructing retention basins, elevating infrastructure, and relocating communities living in the most dangerous areas, fairly and humanely. Agriculture must be climate-proofed through irrigation rehabilitation, resilient crop varieties, and insurance schemes for small farmers. These efforts could be funded through carbon taxes, penalties for environmental damage, and higher royalties on extractive industries.
Stiglitz’s warning in his recent report for the G20, that inequality is a policy choice and a threat to democracy and environmental stability, captures Indonesia’s dilemma precisely. When policies serve those who profit from land clearing, mineral extraction, and grand construction, environmental protections weaken, labour rights erode, and disaster-risk planning is neglected. The resulting tragedies are not accidents but the foreseeable costs of a development model that treats land and people as expendable.
Indonesia must choose. One path promises continued spectacle, rapid GDP numbers, and expanding wealth for the already powerful. The other path, more demanding but ultimately more secure, focuses on human development, ecological integrity, and fairness. The costs of staying on the present course are already visible in drowned villages, collapsing slopes, shrinking forests, widening inequality, and the quiet consolidation of privilege. The alternative is not a utopian vision but a practical, necessary shift: restore the land, rebuild trust in data, prioritize people over prestige, and reshape the economy toward resilience rather than extraction.
This is not only an economic or environmental imperative but a moral one. Indonesia can still choose it, but time is running out.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
