Murder by Hunger: Indonesia’s War on Papuan Bodies

Jean Ziegler 

Murder by Hunger: Indonesia’s War on Papuan Bodies

Jean Ziegler, former UN special rapporteur on the right to food, once declared that hunger is a weapon of mass destruction in the Third World. In an age where agricultural abundance and technological prowess could feed the planet twice over, Ziegler insisted: a child dying of hunger is not a tragedy—it is murder.

This is exactly what is happening today in Indonesian-occupied Papua.

Reports have surfaced that thousands of Papuans are starving in the highlands, with dozens already dead—many of them children. These are not isolated incidents, not acts of God, and certainly not “natural disasters.” These are the predictable and repeated outcomes of deliberate state policies.

Predictably, Jakarta’s official response is to deflect: they blame bad weather, poor harvests, inaccessible terrain—anything but themselves. But famine in Papua is not new. It has happened before, and it will happen again, as long as Indonesia treats Papuan lives as expendable.

The Pusaka Foundation has already exposed the deeper roots of this structural violence. Its report, “Biopolitics of Food Estate and Metabolic Damage to Papuans,” unmasks a grim reality: under the pretext of "development," the Indonesian state is actively reshaping Papuan diets, ecosystems, and bodies. Sago, the ancestral staple of Papuan life, has been forcefully displaced by rice. Natural foods from gardens and rivers have been replaced by processed instant food. This is not modernization—it is metabolic colonization.

The so-called “food estate” programs are a grotesque failure. Instead of prosperity, they have brought deforestation, dispossession, and military occupation. In places like Nduga, entire communities were bombed and displaced under the cover of “security operations,” with up to 100,000 civilians forced to flee their homes in 2018. Hundreds died in silence, not by bullets—but by malnutrition, disease, and state neglect.

While Jakarta claims that the displaced have returned, churches and NGOs on the ground tell a very different story. IDPs still wander in limbo, stripped of their land, dignity, and future. With a life expectancy 16 years lower than the national average, Papuans are being condemned to premature death—not by accident, but by design.

And the hypocrisy is staggering.

While Papua starves, Jakarta proudly sends 50 tons of food and aid to Palestine—an act meant to win praise on the international stage. Yet not even a tenth of that aid reaches its own starving citizens in Wamena or Lanny Jaya. Indonesia loudly condemns Israeli apartheid while turning a blind eye to its own militarized occupation, cultural erasure, and engineered famines in Papua.

Let us be clear: this is not about failed policy. This is about a slow genocide—administered through hunger, displacement, and denial.

If Ziegler is right—and he is—then Indonesia is not merely negligent in Papua. It is guilty.