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Jakarta Post

Agrarian reform policy and selfish sectors

In a speech on Jan

Noer Fauzi (The Jakarta Post)
Berkeley
Mon, November 23, 2009

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Agrarian reform policy and selfish sectors

I

n a speech on Jan. 31, 2007, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono proclaimed that the agrarian reform program would start gradually in 2007. Implementation will be preceded by allocating land for the poor, with the land originating in forest conversion, as well as other land to be allocated in the interest of the people, as allowed by our land law.

There are three types of land targeted for redistribution:

First, 1.1 million hectares of state land, which are under the National Land Agency's (BPN) jurisdiction.

Second, 8.15 million hectares of land in state forest zone areas, which are designated as converted production forest.

Third, there is also "idle land" or state land that has been unused, misused, or illegally used by private companies. BPN Head Joyo Winoto estimated at that time the "idle land" was about 7.3 million hectares across Indonesia.

But the land distribution platform is not easy to implement. The government has never been able to create effective teamwork among government agencies, especially the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) the Forestry Ministry and Agriculture Ministry. Each government agency works for itself and is very reluctant to cooperate with other state institutions.

My interview with several officials at BPN and Forestry Ministry only confirmed that here has been little progress over the past three years to improve communication or coordination between these two agencies. The result is that the BPN agenda to redistribute the 8.15 million hectares of state forest land remains stalled.

The Forestry Ministry continues to maintain its position as the landlord of the largest extent of national land, designated as "Forest Area". Yet BPN calculates that the local population already control some 60 percent of that land.

Civil society organizations including Aman (The Alliance of Indigenous People of the Archipelago) are challenging the Forestry Ministry's jurisdictional claim.

AMAN and their supporters are campaigning to gain legal recognition for land rights of local communities living in areas designated as state forest.

AMAN, and numerous local communities refuse to count customary society land, forest and territory as part of the ministry's territory, which it claims as Forest Zone.

The ministry has various names for the community forest: "Production Forest", "Limited Production Forest", "Protected Forest", or "Conservation Forest", each associated with its own restrictions on local communities' use, management and control of their land.

It is true that the ministry has made several concessions to the customary society by allowing them to utilize the ministry's forest. Yet for each of these, ownership and ultimate control over all forms of resource access remain with the Forestry Ministry.

Meanwhile, the Agriculture Ministry has its own disagreements with the agrarian reform agendas of BPN and the Forestry Ministry. The Agriculture Department has long focused on raising the production of staple crops, especially rice, through popular schemes including the Rice Intensification System (SRI).

The Agriculture Ministry (especially its Directorate General of Land and Water Management) has promoted the bill on Agriculture Land for Sustainable Food Farm in order to protect land for sustainable agricultural staples and to prevent the conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses.

According to the ministry, from 1979 to 1999 some 1,627,514 hectares of Indonesia's irrigated rice land were converted to non-agricultural uses, an average of 81,367 hectares per year.

In Java alone, a million hectares of irrigated rice land were removed from agricultural use (some 50,000 hectares per year), while outside of Java over 600,000 hectares of irrigated rice fields were lost to agriculture (more than 31,000 hectares per year).

The preamble to Indonesia's Constitution clearly states that pursuing social justice is the ultimate goal of the state. Agrarian reform policy should be, basically, a government policy toward social justice.

But many of Indonesia's agriculture bureaucracies have not been guided by social justice as their main organizing or policy principle. Civil society activists advocate an integrated agrarian reform program genuinely directed by social justice principles.

Under the guise of developmentalism since Soeharto and even until now, agrarian bureaucracies prefer to serve big business, using coercive land acquisition policies to grant huge land concessions for mining, logging, and plantations at the expense of the rural poor. But development does not require our government to serve corporations over social justice for the people.

The uncoordinated policies' bureaucracies will continue to force poor and marginalized people off their land, and deny them resources for livelihoods under their own control.

Eleven years since Reformasi started in 1998, we need to find ways to make the agrarian bureaucracies pursue social justice for all Indonesian people. This will only happen if government bureaucracies take social justice seriously as their main organizing principle, including for their agrarian policies.

The writer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at the University of California, Berkeley.

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