Medan
Gateway to 70% of Indonesia's palm oil plantations, producing half the world's supply — a colonial plantation hub turned global commodity chokepoint serving 16.2 million workers.
Indonesia produces half the world's palm oil — 47 million tonnes in 2023, 54% of global exports — and the commodity that feeds this industry flows through Medan, Sumatra's largest city at 2.5 million people. The metropolitan area of nearly 5 million is the largest urban centre outside Java, and its economy grows at 6.4% annually, above the national average. Beyond the multicultural Sumatran capital framing, Medan is the administrative headquarters of the world's largest plantation belt.
Almost 70% of Indonesia's oil palm plantations are on Sumatra, and North Sumatra province leads them all. The colonial origins are explicit: Dutch colonists founded the Deli Company in the late 19th century, transforming Medan into 'Het Land Dollar' — the land of money — by exporting tobacco, rubber, tea, and palm oil through the Deli Railway to Belawan port. They transported Javanese contract workers from Java to labour on the plantations, creating a population structure that persists today: Batak (indigenous), Javanese (descendants of transported plantation workers), Chinese, Malay, Acehnese, and Indian communities coexist in one of Southeast Asia's most ethnically diverse cities.
Almost 70% of Indonesia's oil palm plantations are on Sumatra, and North Sumatra province leads them all.
The palm oil industry now represents 4.5% of Indonesia's GDP and employs over 16.2 million people directly and indirectly. North Sumatra's investment realisation reached Rp48.27 trillion in 2024, a 105% increase from the prior year. But the industry's expansion has come at documented ecological cost: deforestation, peatland destruction, and habitat loss that a decade of sustainability commitments has only partially slowed.
Medan processes and exports the product that makes Indonesia's plantation economy globally indispensable. The biological parallel is the fig tree in a tropical forest: a keystone species whose fruit sustains an outsized proportion of the ecosystem's consumers. Palm oil performs the same function in the global food system — present in roughly half of all supermarket products, from margarine to shampoo — and Medan is the trunk through which the supply flows.