The release of the investigative documentary “Pesta Babi” (Pig Feast) has triggered an unusually intense wave of public debate and political unease across Indonesia.

Directed by Dandhy Dwi Laksono and Cypri Jehan Paju Dale, the film captures the systemic collision between Indonesia’s ambition for national food security and the survival of indigenous communities in South Papua.

Focusing on the regencies of Merauke, Boven Digoel, Mappi and Asmat, the documentary reveals how forests, wetlands and savannahs are being converted on a massive scale to accommodate state-backed National Strategic Projects (PSN).

Amid a growing number of independent screenings that have frequently faced intimidation and forced dispersal by security forces, the film has become a fractured mirror reflecting the trajectory of development in Indonesia’s eastern frontier.

The documentary’s title is rooted in a deeply layered sociological metaphor derived from the Awon Atatbon ritual tradition of the Muyu people in Boven Digoel. Within the social structure of Papua’s interior communities, the ritual is led by tribal elders to safeguard ancestral rights, historical memory, lineage and the cosmological balance between humans and the forest.

The ceremony involves the slaughter of sacred pigs (ámín áwon) by ritual custodians (amín bòn tíbrí) under strict customary regulations (amop), the planting of sacred trees (waruk) and the chanting of ritual songs (kondum) intended to summon prosperity.

The entire tradition depends on ecological continuity. Without intact forests, wild pigs disappear. Without pigs, the Muyu people’s cultural existence begins to collapse.

Yet under the shadow of contemporary agrarian expansion, the meaning of “pig feast” has undergone a tragic symbolic inversion. The phrase has increasingly become a metaphor for the greed of political elites and transnational capital exploiting Papua’s customary lands.

What emerges is a portrait of how Indigenous living spaces and cultures are reduced to speculative commodities by development regimes in Jakarta that claim to be pursuing national progress.

At the same time, the struggle to defend customary land has not been free from internal tensions over representation and consent. The protest raised by Mama Yasinta, a 61-year-old Indigenous woman from Wogikel village in Ilwayab District who objected to the use of her image in the documentary without her approval, underscores the ethical dilemmas surrounding visual advocacy in remote Indigenous communities.

That conflict is now materializing on an enormous scale through Indonesia’s national food and energy development agenda. Through central government regulations such as Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Regulation No. 8/2023 and Presidential Decree No. 15/2024, millions of hectares in South Papua have been earmarked for sugarcane plantations, bioethanol factories and industrial-scale rice estates.

The policy has effectively created a new territorial frontier where customary land ownership collides directly with large-scale capital penetration.

Development machinery

The agrarian landscape of South Papua is increasingly dominated by giant corporations orchestrating colossal land-clearing operations.

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.

According to John Martinkus in his 2021 book “The Road: Uprising in West Papua,” the 4,300-kilometer Trans-Papua Highway, designed to connect Sorong to Merauke, demonstrates how logistical corridors carve through pristine rainforest and damage sacred customary territories.

For indigenous communities in both the highlands and lowlands, the highway resembles a spear piercing the heart of their traditional defenses. Rather than delivering prosperity, the road has facilitated the tactical mobilization of security forces deep into remote regions and accelerated deadly cycles of conflict.

Escalating armed conflict linked to infrastructure expansion has frequently culminated in large-scale security operations, forcing tens of thousands of civilians to flee into forests where many endure hunger and displacement. That same spiral of violence now looms over South Papua’s food estate projects.

A similar security-centered approach is being deployed to suppress local resistance, secure extractive capital and marginalize the fundamental sovereignty of Indigenous Papuans over their customary lands. Development imposed from above ultimately transforms into a via dolorosa — a road of suffering — for indigenous communities rendered strangers on their own land.

To prevent further collapse, agrarian governance in South Papua requires urgent and radical restructuring. The central government should impose a comprehensive moratorium on all National Strategic Projects in the region to allow for independent environmental and social audits.

Ending the militarized approach and withdrawing security forces from concession areas are essential prerequisites for restoring public safety and trust. Legal recognition of customary territories through regional regulations, alongside the genuine implementation of FPIC protocols, must become non-negotiable priorities.

Only by decolonizing Indonesia’s development paradigm and returning to sustainable models rooted in local ecological wisdom — such as sago cultivation and traditional agroforestry — can the dignity and survival of indigenous Papuans be protected from ecological and cultural extinction.

Dr. Jannus TH Siahaan is an analyst and observer of green economics and Indonesia’s political economy. He is a doctoral alumnus of Padjadjaran University.