Wanam Village is changing.
For generations, life in this remote coastal community of South Papua has been shaped by distance.
Rivers and waterways often provided the most reliable routes between settlements.
Muddy ground limited movement. Farmers struggled to move produce to buyers.
Formal employment was scarce, and basic infrastructure that people elsewhere might take for granted remained limited.
Wanam sits at the centre of one of Indonesia’s most ambitious National Strategic Projects, a program intended to expand domestic food production while building the infrastructure needed to connect an isolated part of Papua Selatan with the wider regional economy.
Roads, irrigation systems, flood-control works and agricultural demonstration areas are now being developed around a community that until recently had few land connections beyond its immediate surroundings.
That transformation has generated controversy.
International reporting and advocacy have focused extensively on deforestation, customary land disputes, environmental risks, military involvement and allegations of intimidation against critics of the
Merauke food and
energy estate.
Those questions deserve scrutiny.
Large development projects should never receive immunity from criticism simply because they carry the label of national importance.
Indigenous land rights must be respected, environmental impacts must be monitored, and communities should be meaningfully involved in decisions affecting their land and livelihoods.
Infrastructure and employment cannot, by themselves, justify irreversible environmental damage or the loss of customary rights.
But scrutiny should work in both directions.
If the environmental and political costs of development deserve attention, so do the employment, infrastructure, agricultural production and opportunities being created for people who have lived with isolation for generations.
And increasingly, some of those changes can be measured.
From a plan to something visible Wanam is no longer simply an ambition drawn on a planning map.
In May 2025, a four-hectare demonstration area recorded Wanam’s first rice harvest. Yields were approximately 2.5 to 2.8 tonnes of dry unhusked rice per hectare.
The initial harvest was small compared with Indonesia’s mature rice-growing areas, but the crop demonstrated that rice could be cultivated under local conditions and provided seed material for further planting.
That is an important first step, but it should not be mistaken for proof that large-scale commercial rice production has already been established.
A demonstration harvest shows technical potential. It does not, by itself, establish whether production will remain productive and economically viable at scale.
That will depend on successive harvests, water management, production costs, market access and whether local farmers can participate meaningfully in the emerging agricultural economy
Infrastructure has nevertheless moved considerably further.
The Wanam-Muting road, together with irrigation and flood-control works, is intended to reduce the isolation that has long shaped daily life in the area.
The significance of that road extends well beyond trucks carrying machinery.
Before improved access, residents and workers described movement through the area as extremely difficult because of mud and dependence on waterways.
For a farmer, better access can mean produce reaching buyers more quickly.
For a parent, it can eventually mean easier access to schools and clinics.
For a local business, it can mean goods arriving at lower cost.
And for young people, it can mean employment becoming available closer to home.
Those are possibilities rather than guarantees. But in a community where distance has long been one of the greatest barriers to economic participation, connectivity can have consequences far beyond the immediate construction project.
A lesson that resonates in Fiji
Fiji’s own food-systems strategy recognises that a farmer’s productivity depends not only on what happens on the farm, but also on access to finance, infrastructure, transport, energy, technology, processing facilities and markets. The Government’s Horizon 2030 framework explicitly links food production with rural development, employment, resilience and market access.
The circumstances are obviously different. Fiji is a small island state, while Wanam forms part of a vast mainland landscape. But the basic economic principle is similar: producing food is only one part of building a functioning food economy. Getting that food to market is another.
The people behind the project
Paul Tinus is one of them.
The 29-year-old indigenous resident of Wanam previously worked as a sailor, a job that regularly took him away from his wife and two children.
He has now worked for about two years on the Wanam project, earning a monthly salary while remaining close to home.
“My family’s economy has been helped,” he told Indonesian media in February 2026.
His story is modest which is precisely why it matters.
Development debates tend to revolve around millions of hectares, billions of rupiah, environmental assessments and national policy. For Paul, the calculation is much simpler.
A job. A regular salary. More time with his children.
His experience does not prove that the entire project is delivering broad-based prosperity. It does, however, demonstrate that some of the economic benefits being discussed are not entirely theoretical.
Kampung Wanam head Kosmas Serilius has said that some residents are already working on the project.
Wanam has a population of about 743 people, and he hopes employment will expand further among local youth.
That does not mean every resident supports every part of the project.
Nor should it be presented that way.
But it demonstrates why descriptions of Wanam as a community uniformly opposed to development are no more accurate than claims that everyone welcomes it without reservation.
Local opinion is more complicated.
And more interesting.
The challenge now is ensuring that local participation goes beyond providing labour for a large national project.
If Wanam is to become a genuine agricultural and economic centre, local people should have opportunities not only to work on the project, but eventually to participate as farmers, suppliers, transport operators, traders, contractors and business owners.
That is where development begins to become local opportunity.
What a road means to a farmer
Inosensio Sigipse has farmed in Wanam for around a decade.
His support for development centres not on national food-security statistics but on something more immediate: getting his produce to market.
“If there is development, perhaps houses and roads can be built, so it will be easier for us to sell our agricultural produce,” he said.
That statement perhaps captures the Wanam debate better than any national statistic.
For policymakers, the project is about food security, infrastructure and economic development.
For a farmer, it is about whether the food he grows can actually reach a buyer.
That distinction matters.
A road is not development simply because it exists. Irrigation is not development simply because concrete channels have been built. A rice field is not development simply because it produces a harvest.
Infrastructure becomes development when it changes what people can realistically do with their lives and livelihoods.
Again, there is a useful parallel with Fiji.
For a country that continues to confront a significant food-import bill, improving domestic production is only part of the challenge.
Fiji’s Horizon 2030 framework identifies transport, storage, processing, market infrastructure and connectivity as necessary parts of an integrated food economy. It also stresses that farmers should become participants in a modern and commercially viable food system rather than simply producers of raw commodities.
The lesson from Wanam, therefore, is not that Fiji should replicate Indonesia’s model.
It is that infrastructure policy and agricultural policy cannot sensibly be separated.
A farmer cannot sell what cannot reach the market.
A crop cannot become an industry without buyers, transport, storage and processing.
And rural development cannot be measured only by the amount of infrastructure constructed.
The price and promise of
progress
Wanam therefore sits at an unusual crossroads.
n one side is a community that has lived with isolation, limited infrastructure and scarce formal employment.
On the other is a development programme of enormous scale, backed by the Indonesian state and intended to turn South Papua into a major centre of food production.
Neither reality should be ignored.
The environmental and customary-land concerns surrounding the wider Merauke project are serious and must continue to be examined.
But the existence of those concerns should not mean that the aspirations of Wanam residents for roads, jobs and better access to markets are dismissed either. Those aspirations are real
So are the risks.
For Fiji, the comparison is particularly relevant because the country faces its own tension between expanding agricultural production and protecting the land and natural resources on which rural communities depend. Fiji’s agricultural policy discussions have long recognised the need to improve productivity while protecting land resources and environmental sustainability.
The challenge is therefore not to choose between development and protection.
It is to determine whether development can be done in a way that genuinely benefits the people who have lived on the land for generations.
For Wanam, that means the road must lead somewhere more meaningful than a project boundary.
The rice harvest must become more than a demonstration plot
Jobs must become more than temporary construction work.
And infrastructure must ultimately create opportunities that remain with the community long after the machinery has left.
Wanam’s future should not be measured simply by how much land is developed.
It should be measured by what that development allows the people of Wanam to do.
If farmers can reach markets more easily, if young people can find decent work without leaving home, if businesses can grow, and if families gain better access to essential services, then the transformation will have a meaning beyond national statistics.
But if those gains come at the expense of customary land, environmental integrity or the ability of
Indigenous communities to determine their own future, then the costs will be much harder to justify.
That is the balance Wanam now has to find.
And it is a balance familiar to countries such as Fiji: how to turn land, agriculture and infrastructure into lasting opportunity without sacrificing the natural and cultural foundations on which that opportunity depends.
Wanam is changing.
The question is no longer whether development should happen.
The more important question is what kind of development Wanam should become.
The following sources were consulted in putting together this commentary: Indonesia Ministry of
n Public Works; ANTARA News; Media Indonesia; Radio Republik Indonesia; Yuwono, Lex Publica
(2024); Prawira et al., KRTHA BHAYANGKARA (2025); Suryani, Jurnal Masyarakat dan Budaya (2016).
