North Maluku
Indonesia's fastest-growing province (23% GDP growth 2023) from nickel, but mining districts remain poorest.
The Sultanate of Ternate once ruled these islands when cloves grew nowhere else on earth. Now Halmahera's volcanic soils yield a different treasure: the nickel deposits that made North Maluku Indonesia's fastest-growing province. GDP growth averaged 20.1% from 2021 to 2023, reaching 23% in 2023—the highest in the nation. Foreign investment hit US$5 billion that year, almost entirely targeting nickel. The province exported US$1.1 billion in December 2024 alone.
But the boom's benefits haven't reached the mining districts themselves. Central and East Halmahera—where PT Weda Bay Nickel controls 45,065 hectares with 635 million tonnes of ore—remain the province's poorest regencies. Sixteen thousand hectares of forest have disappeared in Central Halmahera since 2009. The Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park recorded 42 workplace deaths between 2018 and 2024. Isolated O'Hongana Manyawa Indigenous people find mining concessions overlapping 40% of their forested lands.
Presidential candidate Anies Baswedan visited the Ternate Sultanate's palace to critique this paradox: 'fantastic economic growth' that hasn't delivered welfare. By 2026, North Maluku will test whether nickel wealth can be redirected toward local communities—or whether the province repeats the Spice Islands' colonial pattern of extraction without development.