Usep Setiawan, the chairman of the Consortium for Agrarian Reform’s national council, said the BPN’s limited authority could impede progress toward achieving “genuine land reform programs”.

“For instance, the agency is not authorized to attend Cabinet-level meetings, or to make any decisions at ministerial level,” Usep said.

So, this meant that BPN was unable to solve any land disputes involving peasants and ministerial bodies because the agency was not vested with any authority to take on such disputes, he added.

In any countries that take land reform seriously, such as South Africa, they usually had a special body—the authority of which was equivalent to that of a ministry—tasked with implementing land reform programs and managing inputs from the farming and business communities, Usep added. “They also have a special court to process land disputes.”

Under a 2006 Presidential Decree, the government had appointed the National Land Agency, known as BPN, to spearhead the Lands for Justice and People’s Welfare Program as part of its efforts to implement land reform at national level.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reportedly promised in 2007 that  government would provide between eight and nine million hectares of land to poor farmers, yet the agency plans to distribute only 142,000 hectares to 389 villages in 21 provinces by the end of 2010.

Radhar Tribaskoro, a political and economic advisor to the Consortium for Agrarian Reform, concurred, saying that BPN should be upgraded or replaced by an institution with clearer functions and more power.

“BPN must focus not only on the provision and equal distribution of land to farmers, but also on the improvement of access to infrastructure and facilities,” Radhar said.

BPN is still not clear on its farming access programs which need solid cooperation with other ministries, including the Trade Ministry, says Radhar.

Real land reform should be based on a grand design and should be aligned with comprehensive economic policies in the hope of improving people’s welfare, he said.

Meanwhile, Achmad Yakub, the chairman of the national policy studies department for the Indonesian Farmers Union, known as SPI, said any government-appointed institution mandated to implement land reform should first identify the objectives of land reform.

“It needs to identify poor farmers eligible for access to land distribution or allocation, as well as the land to be distributed,” Achmad said.

BPN should have the guts to issue a moratorium on the apparently unstoppable increasing ownership and use of large land holdings owned by  big private companies, he went on. “The question is: Can the agency do that? If it had the authority, it could.”

“But the government needs to ensure and guarantee that any certified land given to farmers will not be resold to  big business owners,” he said.

In 2008, SPI recorded that there were 28.3 million farmer families in Indonesia, but with 45 percent of the total land area owned by only 11 percent of such families. There are now more than 12.4 million hectares of abandoned land across the country, yet most farmers in Java only possess an average of less than 0.5 hectares of land.

According to SPI, between 2007 and 2008, there were 139 reported cases related to land disputes involving farmers, the government, and the business sector, with more than 45,000 farming families evicted, and 14 people dead as the result of such disputes. (tsy)

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