The Indonesian administration of President Prabowo Subianto is pushing ahead with a multibillion-dollar plan to build a vast string of plantations in South Papua province that it hopes will secure domestic supplies of rice as well as sugarcane, as the government seeks to ramp up production of biofuel as a means of weaning itself off foreign sources of oil. In mid-October, state-owned construction company PT Hutama Karya won a contract worth 4.8 trillion rupiah ($286 million), the biggest public tender so far this year, to build an 80-kilometer (50-mile) stretch of highway linking the coast of South Papua to the interior. In early August, the deputy energy minister, Yuliot Tanjung, said building the food estate as well as the initial infrastructure of the bioethanol supply chain would cost

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