Editorial: Nickel Boom? Not for the People of Raja Ampat

Usually, it begins in a plush café inside a five-star hotel in Jakarta. An official from a mineral-rich Indonesian province meets with a broker, a lawmaker from the ruling coalition, and someone from the mining ministry. Over meals that cost more than many Indonesians earn in a month, paid for by taxpayer money, they begin the deal-making.

The topic? Land. Specifically, land they do not even own. This time, for a nickel mine.

They talk percentages, concession rights, and fees. But rarely, if ever, do they talk about the people who actually live on that land: Indigenous communities, farmers, fishers. There is no mention of consent, or the destruction to come. Only calculations of who gets how much, and when.

If the price is right, the next meeting is arranged. This time with the real decision-makers: the corporate bosses. Some are Indonesian tycoons. Others represent foreign investors from China, the United States, or Europe. And then, quietly, the wheels of extraction begin to turn.

What’s tragic is not just the dispossession, but how cheaply it is sold. The personal fees pocketed by these brokers and officials are minuscule compared to the multi-billion dollar value of the mining contracts they approve. But for them, that doesn’t matter. Once the fee is handed over the consequences are someone else’s problem.

Whether it’s toll roads, railways like the massively overbudget Whoosh project, forest clearances, or nickel mining in Halmahera and now Raja Ampat, the playbook is always the same: pay big up front, and you own the outcome.

This is not development. It’s extractive populism. It cloaks itself in the language of progress, jobs, and national pride, but in reality, it’s about converting natural wealth into private gain, fast, while telling the public they should be grateful.

Indonesia’s push for nickel downstreaming, where ore is being refined and processing domestically instead of exporting it raw is the latest poster child for this model. On paper, it looks like a success story. The government boasts about a foreign investment boom, especially in smelters built by Chinese-backed firms. In 2023 alone, Indonesia attracted over $7 billion in nickel-related investment.

But where does that money go?

Much of it flows to joint ventures dominated by foreign capital and politically connected conglomerates. Tax holidays, cheap land, and environmental exemptions sweeten the deals. Meanwhile, host communities, often Indigenous and marginalised, are left with nothing. Some lose their land without compensation. Others are pushed into low-paid, dangerous jobs in the smelters that now dot their coastlines.

In Halmahera, home to one of the largest nickel industrial parks, more than 15% of the population still lives below the poverty line. In contrast, companies operating there are making record profits, with one Chinese-Indonesian joint venture reportedly clearing over $800 million in net income last year.

These profits don’t trickle down. They trickle up, to Jakarta, to offshore accounts, to the political machines that keep this system alive.

And now, Europe wants a share of the pie.

Late last month, French President Emmanuel Macron touched down in Jakarta with great fanfare. While the visit was framed as a diplomatic milestone, at its core was business, specifically, France’s appetite for nickel. Macron gave his blessing to Eramet, the French mining giant, to deepen its footprint in Indonesia’s nickel industry under the banner of “green cooperation.” French nickel projects were hailed as part of the global clean energy transition.

But for the people on the ground, in North Maluku, in Papua, and now Raja Ampat, this is not clean. It’s devastating. Forests are cleared. Marine ecosystems are poisoned. Local livelihoods vanish. The colonial echoes are deafening.

This is not sustainable. It is green colonialism. It is the appropriation of land and resources from the Global South in the name of a green future for the North. As Europe scrambles to decarbonize its economy, it turns to countries like Indonesia to bear the ecological burden of its energy shift. The lithium in Chile. The cobalt in Congo. The nickel in Indonesia.
What do these countries have in common? Extracted wealth, exported benefit, and imported suffering.

But what could a just alternative look like?

A different future is not only necessary, it’s possible. But it requires flipping the script of extractive populism and rejecting the false choices presented by today’s nickel boom.

First, it means putting affected communities at the center of all decision-making. No mining should proceed without full, free, prior, and informed consent of the people whose lives it will change. That’s not a radical demand, it’s a basic principle of justice and human rights.

Second, the wealth generated must be shared fairly. That means strengthening public revenue systems, not offering tax holidays to multinational corporations. It means requiring higher royalties, enforcing environmental protections, and creating binding obligations for companies to reinvest in local health, education, and infrastructure. Not through charity, but by law.

Third, Indonesia must invest in economic alternatives. In many regions targeted for nickel mining, sustainable eco-tourism, small-scale fisheries, and agroforestry have greater long-term potential to lift communities out of poverty, without destroying the environment. These are the sectors starved of state support because they don’t deliver fast cash to politicians.

Fourth, a national transition plan must be transparent, accountable, and climate-just. If Indonesia is to play a role in the global green economy, it must be on its own terms, not as a sacrifice zone for the benefit of Tesla, Macron, or Beijing.

Finally, we must reimagine what development means. It is not GDP growth at all costs. It is not flooding villages to feed a smelter. It is not watching dolphins disappear from once-pristine bays in Raja Ampat. Real development is measured by the dignity of its people and the health of its land, not the number of electric cars it helps manufacture abroad.

The tragedy is not just what is happening to Indonesia’s land, sea, and people. It is that this destruction is being sold to us as progress, with our own leaders as salesmen, and foreign powers as buyers. The story always begins in a luxury café. But we know where it ends: bulldozers on ancestral land, poisoned rivers, and communities left with nothing but the dust of someone else’s fortune.

It’s time we ended that story. And wrote a new one.

Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.