Indonesian government wants to turn haze-causing Mega Rice Project around

KIRAM, Indonesia — The Indonesian government plans to resurrect small tracts of the failed Mega Rice Project in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, by restoring abandoned peat areas and developing agriculture there. The plan was initiated by the nation’s Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG), which was established in the wake of the 2015 fire and haze crisis. That year, fires swept across Indonesia’s vast peat swamp zones, which have been widely drained and dried for agriculture. Smoke from the fires sickened half a million Indonesians and polluted the air above neighboring countries. “A lot of it burned in 2015,” BRG chief Nazir Foead said on the sidelines of a national gathering of peat farmers in Kiram village, South Kalimantan province last weekend, referring to the former Mega Rice Project area. “So it’s better to restore it while at the same time increasing its agricultural productivity.” The Mega Rice Project was initiated in 1996 by former strongman President Suharto. He aimed to turn Central Kalimantan province into the nation’s rice bowl, at a time when paddy fields on the country’s main central island of  Java were widely being converted for other uses. To do that, the army general sought to carve out 1 million hectares of agricultural land — an area eight times the size of Los Angeles — from the peat swamps of Central Kalimantan. Thousands of excavators and tens of thousands of workers were deployed to clear peat forests and dig some 4,600 kilometers (2,900 miles) of drainage canals…

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