JAKARTA – It’s been more than a year, and villagers from Kalumpang in Central Kalimantan are still waiting for a sign of progress from an ambitious programme to grow rice on land cleared from a nearby forest.

Roughly 200ha of “hutan galam” or galam forest, on which the villagers relied for food and raw materials, was levelled in 2025 – the trees, shrubs and soil arranged in neat rows – in service of Cetak Sawah Rakyat, a national scheme meant to support villages and promote self-sufficiency in rice production.

Kalumpang’s head of governance, firefighting and societal affairs, Candra Sanjaya, is blunt about the government’s stuttering efforts to boost rice production in the area. “We have not tasted even a single grain of rice from there. It is a failed project,” he said.

Satellite images from Planet Labs, a US Earth observation company, show the forest being cleared over several months, then left unused. It’s a testament to the challenge of coaxing rice to grow on peatland.