Forest cleared for a sugarcane plantation in South Papua, Indonesia. Ulet Ifansasti / Greenpeace

Indonesia appears to be reversing course on a plan to turn vast swaths of tropical rainforest into rice and sugarcane plantations.

Since 2023, Indonesia has been working to convert 7 million acres of tropical forest in New Guinea to farms that will grow rice for food and sugarcane for biofuel, an effort critics have dubbed “the world’s largest deforestation project.” A similar project, spanning some 3 million acres, is underway in Borneo. The aim of these undertakings is to make Indonesia less dependent on imported food and energy.

The country appears to be making significant progress on the first of those two goals, officials said at an event last week. Indonesia has achieved rice self-sufficiency three years ahead of schedule, they said, and it will no longer need to expand rice cultivation in forest areas.…