THE news that Indonesia's government is planning a vast new agricultural project in the south-eastern corner of its Papuan region is a disturbing one, suggesting that its officials have learnt nothing from the disastrous mistakes of the Suharto-era ''transmigrasi'' scheme. The current respite from tensions in bilateral relationships, caused by Papuans fleeing across borders into Papua New Guinea and Australia and raising the separatist cause, could be a temporary one.
It may be recalled that transmigration set out, from the 1960s, to move hundreds of thousands of people from the least fertile, most overcrowded districts of the central islands of Java and Bali to the less-populated outer islands, including Papua. The dream of turning forest into intensive rice farms soon came up with the reality of leached soil, erosion and water problems. Settlers were stranded with insufficient help to get started, and drifted into towns. Apparently ''unoccupied'' land turned out to have traditional owners after all, who turned hostile.
Nor was this the best way of employing Java's ''surplus'' population: the rapid expansion of light manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s did a much happier job of that. Savage attacks on transmigrants by the indigenous Dayak peoples of Kalimantan were among the first signals that the Suharto grip on the country was weakening.
The proposed development in Papua's Merauke region raises many of the same issues. It assumes that up to 2.5 million hectares of land already cleared of its original forest is available for planting, without environmental damage. This appears to be wildly optimistic, both on the amount of open land and its fertility. Second, officials suggest that as many as 625,000 new settlers could be added to the present 175,000 population.
How this could be carried out, without Papuans feeling even more desperately that they are set for the same marginalised fate as Australia's Aborigines or New Zealand's Maori, defies belief. The murky politics of Papua, divided into two provinces since the late President Abdurrahman Wahid's autonomy initiative a decade ago and still an unreformed regional military command, mean the conditional approval of the Papuan Governor, Barnabas Suebu, can't be taken as any sound local consent. While the intention of improving Indonesia's food supply is no doubt genuine, there must be sounder ways than aiming for national self-sufficiency in one big hit on such dubious environmental and social assumptions. As a nation-binding effort it would be counter-productive. Jakarta would win more thanks helping Merauke's local people in the kind of small-holder tree-cropping that is thriving just across the border.