RI agriculture dominated by aging generation

A Dutch sociologist specializing in rural studies has disclosed that agricultural development in Indonesia is dominated by older generations mainly due to limited land ownership.

Ben Bhite, visiting Gadjah Mada University campus in Yogyakarta over the weekend, said that the limited availability of land had forced younger generations to wait for the distribution of land from their parents to enable them to focus on agricultural development, or wait until their parents died.

“On average, to become a farmer the young generation has to wait until the age of 30 or 40,” said Bhite, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Social Studies from The Hague, in an open lecture entitled “Rural Youth and Future Farming”.

This condition had caused the young generation (aged 15 to 24 years) in rural areas to become unemployed or part-time laborers, he said, adding that the situation was made worse by the low interest among the young generation in focusing on agriculture.

“In teaching and learning activities at school there are no lessons on how to become farmers. Students helping their parents to farm after school is considered inappropriate,” he said. “I think this happens because there is a mistake in a way of thinking that always adopts concepts from the West,” he said.

The sociologist explained that nearly 70 percent of poor people in the world lived in rural areas and 80 percent of them were involved in the farming profession.

“It is sad to see the fact that many farmers [in Indonesia] have sold their land, the main source in the agricultural sector. As a result, about 80 percent of farmers in Java do not have their own land,” said the professor, who has conducted research on rural development in Indonesia since the 1970s.

In order to settle the unemployement problem in agrarian Indonesia, it was now time for the government to open up job opportunities in the agricultural sector to as many people as possible, he said.

Bhite continued that job creation in the agricultural sector was important to help settle the poverty problems through government policies that supported programs in agricultural development, especially for young people on a small scale.

However, this had to be accompanied by policies on access to land ownership, he said. “Small-scale agriculture will open access to job creation and will help save the earth, rather than large-scale agricultural development,” he said.

From his field observations at an onion-farming center in Sanden district, Bantul regency, most farmers did not have their own land. They just work under the harvest-sharing model or lease the land on a yearly basis.

“I have to lease all my agricultural land, but over the last two years, it has been difficult to predict the weather so I’ve had to face harvest failure. I can no longer afford to pay the lease and next year I will return my land to its owner, who will later lease to other farmers who have money,” said Rintono, one of the local farmers in Sanden.

Sunar, another farmer who farms on a 0.6-hectare plot of land, said that he has to lease 90 percent of his land. “The farm land here has been owned only by one or two persons since my childhood,” said the father of two.