A Plate of Rice, a Mountain of Questions: When Food Becomes a Contest Between Climate, Capital, and the State

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[my family's paddy field in Banjaran, West Java - watercolor with natural pigment by Aldy]

My family has grown rice for generations. To this day, we almost never buy rice at the supermarket — because we grow our own. For me, a plate of rice has never been a commodity - it is the labour of my family for generations. So when I started noticing "rice" and "paddy fields" appearing everywhere lately — in the pitch decks of carbon startups, in presidential speeches, in headlines about tech billionaires acquiring farmland — I felt I needed to sit down and make sense of it. Because it turns out that the humble rice field is now being discussed through the lens of climate, capital, and the state.

Rice: the staple that quietly pollutes

Let's start with a fact rarely discussed at the dinner table. Rice is a staple for billions of people across Asia, ours included. Yet flooded rice paddies also account for roughly 10–12% of global methane emissions — a climate footprint comparable to the entire aviation industry.

Why? Because continuously flooded fields create oxygen-free conditions in the soil, where methane-producing bacteria thrive. Methane is a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO₂ over the short term. The irony is that rice is not only a culprit — it is also a victim. The crop is acutely vulnerable to the climate crisis: drought, flooding, extreme heat, and increasingly scarce water. So we face a loop that has to be broken: the way we grow our food helps warm the planet, and the warming planet threatens our food in return.

The interesting shift: when tech billionaires buy up farmland

This is the part that made me raise an eyebrow. In an age supposedly defined by AI and everything digital, the world's technology magnates are quietly buying something deeply analogue: farmland.

Bill Gates is now the largest private farmland owner in the United States — around 275,000 acres (roughly 111,000 hectares), of which nearly 250,000 acres are active cropland spread across 17 states.
Mark Zuckerberg has been building Koolau Ranch, a ~1,400-acre estate on Kauai, Hawaii — raising Wagyu and Angus cattle and even growing macadamia trees for feed.

Why would the most "digital" people on earth suddenly be drawn to paddy mud and pastureland? Because food is a real asset whose demand never disappears. Amid climate and geopolitical uncertainty, fertile land has become one of the most resilient forms of wealth. The signal is clear enough: agriculture is no longer treated as a sunset sector, but as a future asset class.

This is seriously remind me of Silo (anyone watching this latest season yet??) although in the series, the tech billionaire bought the farmland for a different reason though.

Rice equals national security

[image via Setkab]

In Indonesia, this story takes on a distinctive colour. Our government increasingly treats food — rice above all — as a matter of national security, not merely economics. I've just returned from Malang, where I witnessed how significant the panen raya (grand harvest) has become. On 17 July 2026, President Prabowo personally led a simultaneous harvest of sugarcane, soybeans, and rice across 43 sites managed by the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) — with the Army harvesting rice, the Air Force sugarcane, and the Navy soybeans. It was a major event, attended by senior military officials, with the president himself stepping into the field.

The message was both symbolic and literal: the state places food production on par with defence. And the result? The government has announced that Indonesia achieved rice self-sufficiency (swasembada) in 2025 — importing no consumption rice throughout the year, with national production (around 34 million tonnes) exceeding consumption (~31 million tonnes), and Bulog's reserve stock reaching a historic high. The FAO even ranked Indonesia as Southeast Asia's largest rice producer and the fourth-largest in the world in 2025. This is a genuine achievement worth acknowledging.

But that achievement comes with caveats we cannot afford to ignore. The food estate programme, particularly in Merauke, Papua, has drawn sharp criticism. The government plans to open paddy land on a scale reaching into the millions of hectares; by October 2025, land clearing was reported in the tens of thousands of hectares, with significant deforestation figures according to environmental organisations. What's at stake is not only trees: it is customary (adat) forest, local food sources such as sago, and the living space of Papua's Indigenous communities - see below a documentary movie published by Greenpeace on this topic:

https://youtu.be/MpdrWgDRVf8?si=VT3PoesWUbPw51J6

[The Pig's Party documentary]

So we hold two truths side by side: Indonesia has genuinely strengthened its food sovereignty, but there are other concerns — environmental and social costs — that still need to be addressed. Refusing to pick only one, and being honest about both, is precisely our shared homework, not a reason to point fingers.

In the carbon sphere: agriculture as the new frontier

Across the most recent climate conferences, I've noticed one clear trend: carbon-market players are moving into agriculture.

Rize (Singapore) — just closed a USD 31 million Series B from investors including Temasek. Its model: sell carbon credits generated from emission reductions on smallholder rice fields, with a flagship project now progressing through Gold Standard certification, targeting over 1 million tonnes of reductions by 2028.
Mitti Labs (US/India) — raised USD 9.5 million in a Series A led by Aramco Ventures. It uses satellite and AI to track irrigation and methane across 100,000+ smallholder rice farms in India, converts the verified reductions into carbon credits, and shares part of the revenue back with farmers — who cut water use ~40% and methane 50%+ without losing yield. Notably, it plans to expand into Indonesia, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia in 2026–2027.
Tambora Carbon Removal (Indonesia) — takes a different route: enhanced rock weathering (ERW) for smallholder farmers, spreading crushed silicate rock on fields to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere permanently. It has signed a landmark carbon-removal offtake agreement with Wild Assets, a CDR-focused buyer — a meaningful step toward scaling verifiable carbon removal from tropical agriculture in the region.

If you open the SRUK registry (Sistem Registri Unit Karbon) of the Ministry of Environment, you'll find that the agriculture sector already lists AWD applied to paddy rice cultivation

[SRUK]

AWD stands for Alternate Wetting and Drying. Instead of keeping paddies continuously flooded, farmers let the water recede until the soil dries somewhat, then re-flood, and repeat. Through this simple practice:

methane-producing bacteria never fully establish, cutting methane emissions by 30–70%;
water use drops by 20–30% — critical amid growing scarcity;
yields are maintained, and farmer incomes can even rise.

Carbon methodologies in agriculture are diversifying, too. Beyond AWD, there are approaches like enhanced rock weathering: silicate rock such as basalt is crushed and spread across farmland. As it reacts, it draws CO₂ from the atmosphere and locks it away as bicarbonate over very long timescales — while also improving soil fertility. Field trials in the US Corn Belt have shown meaningful carbon capture with the bonus of better yields.

The point is this: fields and paddies are no longer just sources of food — they can become carbon-sequestering infrastructure. Promising — provided the integrity of the methodology is rigorously protected, so that one tonne claimed is genuinely one tonne removed.

Indonesia has enormous potential — and not just from rice

https://youtube.com/shorts/TnC-vjb8fzk?si=jIuTL-oBPeTOz82T

This is the part I most want to emphasise, because it's so often forgotten.

We are far too fixated on white rice, when the archipelago is extraordinarily rich in other carbohydrate sources: sorghum, red rice, cassava tiwul, corn "rice", Job's tears (jali-jali), kimpul (taro), and many more. Many of these are more drought-tolerant, need less water, and thrive on marginal land unsuited to flooded paddies.

Imagine if we stopped forcing a single model — flooded paddies everywhere — and started thinking seriously about food diversification and intercropping (tumpang sari): growing several crops on one plot so the soil stays healthier, crop-failure risk is spread, and emissions can be reduced. It is entirely possible that our food-security solution and our climate solution are one and the same — hiding in the "local" crops we've long dismissed as second-class.

True food sovereignty may not be about producing more rice, but about having more choices — ones more resilient to a changing climate, and kinder to the soil we'll hand to the next generation.

A closing thought

A single plate of rice, it turns out, holds so many layers: family memory, methane emissions, billionaire ambition, national defence strategy, and carbon-market opportunity. They all converge in one place — the land where we grow our food.

For me, that is precisely a reason for optimism. If food can be the meeting point of so many forces, then food can also be the lever for enormous change — so long as we govern it honestly, fairly, and in a way that stands with farmers and the environment at the same time.

Now it's your turn. Does your family have a story with a rice field or a farm? Do you think Indonesia should be bolder in diversifying its food beyond rice? And how do you feel watching farmland become a contest for global capital? Reply to this email or share in the comments — I read every one.

Until the next edition. Tend your soil, mind your plate. 🌾