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lantation companies will have to relinquish any land that has not been cultivated within three years of the company obtaining the land-use permits (HGUs) from the government, a senior official at the Agriculture Ministry has said.

The Agriculture Ministry'€™s director general for plantations Gamal Nasir said in Jakarta on Wednesday that the government would have the right to seize sites if the plantation companies had not cultivated them within three years of the issuance of the HGU permits.

He said that seizure of the undeveloped land would be part of the revision of the 2007 regulation, which limits the total plantation area a company can own to 100,000 hectares to forestall land monopolies.

The content of the revision had been agreed by the Presidential Work Unit on Monitoring and Controlling of Development (UKP4) and would be signed by the President by the end of this month at the latest, Ministry Suswono said.

Existing companies who already owned more than 100,000 hectares would not be affected by the revision, but Gamal said if they neglected their land they could lose their HGU permits. The HGU permit issued for the commercial use of land is valid for 25 years and is extendable for up to 25 years.

Gamal said the government would evaluate the use of the land concessions regularly to ensure that the holders did not neglect
them. '€œWe will issue a warning to those who are found to be not using their land optimally,'€ he told The Jakarta Post over the phone on Thursday. '€œWe will take over the land if they don'€™t heed the warning,'€ he added.

Gamal said that the government had to take such action given that many companies '€” including those that owned more than 100,000 hectares of land '€” had yet to optimize planting on their allotted sites.

The regulation will likely affect many plantation companies operating in the palm oil, rubber and cocoa sectors '€” of which the country is the world'€™s largest, second and third largest supplier respectively.

Data from the Agriculture Ministry and Central Statistics Agency shows that Indonesia has 9.07 million hectares of oil palm plantation, with 59.58 percent or 5.41 million hectares already planted.

The data also shows that the country currently has a total of 3.48 million hectares of rubber plantation and a total of 1.73 million hectares of cocoa plantation. Only 15.06 percent, or 525,600 hectares, of total rubber plantation area and 5 percent, or 92,100 hectares, of total cocoa plantation are planted.

Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI) executive director Fadhil Hasan explained that the uncultivated areas in the data might be areas that had been planted but yet to yield output, as oil palm trees needed around four years before being ready to harvest.

He, however, said that even if there were unplanted areas, the government had first to confirm why the plots of lands were left vacant before seizing them.

'€œThere are various reasons why a plantation company might not have fully cultivated its land. It might, for example, still be in the planning stage,'€ Fadhil told the Post.

He added that some companies might have left the areas unplanted to conserve forest or they might still be negotiating with residents on the release of the land. The association has recently criticized the regulation warning that it could affect the expansion plans of a number of major oil palm plantation companies.

Among the palm oil companies with more than 100,000 hectares of plantation are Sinar Mas Group (320,463 hectares), Singapore-based Wilmar International Ltd. (210,000 hectares), PT Astra Agro Lestari (192,372 hectares), PT London Sumatra (245,629 hectares) and Raja Garuda Mas (259,075 hectares).