Borneo’s last remaining pristine rainforest under threat from proposed Infrastructure Project funded by Asian Development Bank

Senior Asian Development Bank (ADB) officials today respond on the bank’s proposed financing of road projects which will cut through the last remaining intact forest in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan). The proposed project poses a serious risk to the survival of indigenous Dayak peoples in North and East Kalimantan who are yet to have their rights to their traditional territories recognised and secured.

These proposed roads not only threaten the Republic of Indonesia achieving its key climate and deforestation goals, but also the ecologically-sensitive Kayan Mentarang National Park, the largest protected area on the island, and the survival of impacted indigenous peoples who are yet to have their rights to their traditional territories recognised and secured.

The demands of the indigenous peoples are clear – they want their rights to be

respected and safeguarded in local and national legislation and regulations prior to any future development on their ancestral territories.

These high-risks roads however will beckon in a new wave of investment, transmigration, and land-grabbing, all to the detriment of the peoples that have been safeguarding these forests for millennia.

ADB’s downgraded the project to ‘Category B’ risk which means a lower level of due diligence in relation to its Safeguard Requirements on Involuntary Resettlement and Indigenous Peoples, despite ADB’s own analysis noting:

“impacts on a high percentage of ethnic minorities, including the Dayak and Banjar peoples in North Kalimantan, are expected…and result in their economic displacement”. [ADB’s Initial Poverty and Social Analysis, 2020]

 

“These roads are going to destroy ecosystems and take away our customary lands. The government says it’s for us, but it’s really for the palm oil industry and their plantations.”

 

Darwis, Green of Borneo, an indigenous-led NGO operating in Nunukan

ADB’s proposed $300 million loan to finance the National Roads Development Project (Kalimantan) is touted to “improve regional connectivity by rehabilitating and upgrading road sections of North and East Kalimantan Provinces” and contribute to “the government [of Indonesia’s] 2016 border economic area program”. The program seeks to “enhance cross-border trade” with customs facilities planned in North Kalimantan to facilitate further integration of the Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil industry.

“There are thousands of hectares of unrealised concessions straddling the proposed roads. ADB has overlooked the impact this will have on impacted indigenous peoples and ignored the likely devastating environmental impact these plantations will have”

[Angus MacInnes, Forest Peoples Programme]

FPP representatives raised these concerns with ADB North American Representative Office (NARO) on 13th October after local NGOs failed to get a response. During the meeting, Bruce Dunn, ADB Director of Safeguards noted “[the project] is on our watchlist…we have flagged [it] for extra due-diligence and we’ll be looking at [the project] pretty carefully. If something is flagged at an early stage, it will be reviewed again.”    

Bruno Carrasco, ADB’s Director General noted “Some projects will be filtered out through the Paris alignment process. We are screening everything we [ADB] do to see whether it is Paris aligned. This will eliminate a lot of projects, including perhaps the Kalimantan Roads Projects and others which look fuzzy. So, a lot of projects will be eliminated from a climate change point of view…the climate change battle will be won or lost in Asia.”

Darwis from Green of Borneo said “No roads without rights. We want the construction to be suspended until our land rights are recognized, and until the government ensures there’s no big environmental impact.”

During the meeting with ADB NARO, Reverend Seamus Finn reiterated that “It is paramount that the loan be delayed to allow the project preparation to be carried out in conformity with ADB’s own safeguard policies”

In April 2021, fears the proposed infrastructure would open up Dayak peoples’ lands to large scale commercial exploitation prompted the United Nations to again call on the Government of Indonesia to adopt safeguards “to secure the possession and ownership rights of local communities before proceeding further” with any development in the Kalimantan border region.

“The companies believe that there is no community in the area. There has never been any form of socialisation. Instead, we have a palm oil army who patrol their plantation. They don’t want villagers around their company operations even though this is our land.” [Community representative, Sebuku sub-district, Nunukan – names have been omitted due to fears of criminalisation and reprisals]

This has not deterred ADB, which despite formal communication with concerned local NGOs has continued to deny their repeated requests to talk to senior ADB decision-makers.

NGOs insist the project should be classified as category A as, in ADB terms, it is likely to have “significant adverse impacts that are irreversible, diverse, or unprecedented”.

Contact:

Angus MacInnes (UK): angus@forestpeoples.org

Further information:

IMAGES AVAILABLE

[Caption: The proposed road will ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘upgrade’ road sections, some of which are existing logging roads]

[Caption: The proposed road (red) in Mahakam Ulu [left]. Existing palm oil concessions in Mahakam Ulu [right] – many of which have yet to be realised.]  

The impacted districts of Mahakam Ulu (East Kalimantan), Nunukan and Malinau (North Kalimantan) are overwhelmingly populated by numerous Dayak indigenous peoples, the majority of whom have yet to have their customary rights protected through local regulations making their ancestral lands especially vulnerable to expropriation. Furthermore, local politicians in these districts continue to champion oil palm expansion as a “principal component” to their region’s development, noting, “when the roads are finished, plantation development will easily follow”.

This region has been targeted for palm oil expansion since 2005 when government officials announced plans to make a plantation corridor the entire length of the border with Malaysia. Despite the subsequent abandonment of the “Palm Oil Mega Project” – the world’s largest continuous palm oil estate - concessions have continued to be handed out to palm oil development without prior consultation with affected communities. The result is a sea of unrealised concessions which can only become operational with “hard infrastructure”. 

In North and East Kalimantan, rights-recognition has been especially slow and, where roads have been pushed through, they have led to the dispossession of vast swathes of indigenous lands for large-scale industrial plantations.

Establishing and running the large-scale industrial plantations, which will be facilitated by ADB’s proposed project, is labour intensive. Migrant labour will be needed to compensate for the low-population density of Mahakam Ulu (28,000), Malinau (90,000) and Nunukan (180,000), and will further threaten the displacement of indigenous peoples as the Government of Indonesia currently fails to recognise and protect their rights to their customary lands.

ADB’s assessment crucially overlooks its own rationale for advancing the project which by its own admission will “encourage the movement of people towards these areas instead of congested megacities of Jakarta and Surabaya”. The roads will trigger a new transmigration boom to Kalimantan’s sparsely populated interior. These new State-sponsored resettlement schemes are already causing a new wave of environmental destruction and human rights abuses.