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Land use optimization for agriculture is an attempt to increase the utilization of land resources by matching agricultural land with the most productive crop to both expand the plantable area and maximize productivity. The expansion of the cultivated area is actively occurring in the eastern Indonesian, region of East Seram, Maluku Province. One of the prospective commodity crop planned for the region is sugarcane (Saccharum spp.). The method used for evaluating land for determining optimal land use is land suitability analysis, a combination of multi-criteria decision making and GIS mapping. We used multi-criteria decision making to identify the optimal area for sugarcane plantations and sugar industries, using criteria to identify land suitable for sugarcane growing in three suitability classes, very suitable, suitable and unsuitable, subject to achieving economic viability for a sugar mill. Mill viability was based on the ability of the planted area to support at least a minimum number of cane milling days per years (150/y), and a daily production target of ≥8,000 tonnes cane crushed per day (TCD). In East Seram district our analysis of a selected 206,235 ha are identified 34,894 ha in suitability classes highly suitable, moderately suitable and marginally suitable. The identified optimal area was estimated to be capable of producing 2,119,424 tonnes of sugarcane per year, yielding a mill productivity of 14,129 TCD over the crushing season, thus indicating strong economic viability for a single mill but possibly not for two mills