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any have welcomed President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s ambitious land reform plan, which is believed to help alleviate poverty and inequality.

The President’s flagship program, however, has also met with criticism, with some saying it may stall unless it is complemented by capacity building programs for farmers and infrastructure improvements.

“This land reform agenda will fail if we are only talking about land redistribution without deeper analysis,” Ahmad Erani Yustika, the director general for development and empowerment of villages at the Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Ministry, said on Thursday.

Sending farmers to new areas and giving them new plots of land to cultivate without preparing them or the surrounding infrastructure would be “suicidal,” Ahmad added.

“The farmers would definitely fail,” he said.

The Jokowi administration has announced that the planned land reform would see a total of 21.7 million hectares of idle land across the nation allocated to groups of people, so that they can improve their welfare and ultimately help reduce economic disparity. Of the total land to be allotted, 13 million ha would go to indigenous people and the remainder to impoverished farmers.

However, Ahmad said, the government had to provide the beneficiaries with various forms of support that would foster economic activity in the areas around the newly cultivated lands.

“Their livelihood in the first year of farming must be the primary concern, as in the first months they will just start the planting process. [The government must take into account] how they can meet their everyday needs [during the initial phase],” Ahmad said.

Supporting infrastructures, such as road access and proper irrigation facilities, also had to be prioritized.

Empowering the new land owners with the skills to cultivate the land and preserve the environment was also the government’s task.

“Our ministry can help with this,” Ahmad said.

According to the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF), most farmers in Indonesia still have a low level of knowledge about farming technology, resulting in low productivity.

For instance, Indonesia only produces an annual 5.1 tons of rice per hectare, while the ideal rice productivity is 8.3 tons per hectare, according to INDEF data.

INDEF data show that Indonesian farmers on average earn around Rp 1 million (US$75) a month, lower than the 2017 minimum wage in any region of Indonesia. As a result, many farmers had to find other sources of income. Even worse, many farmers ended up selling their land, INDEF economist Imaduddin Abdullah said.

He said that, given this situation, the agrarian reform agenda would hardly improve farmers’ welfare if the government only gives away land without assisting the land owners.

“There are high expectations for the land redistribution program to improve farmers’ welfare. However, when the land is allotted but the owner can do nothing with it and there is no government assistance, it will instead trigger new problems and even conflicts,” Imaduddin said.

He said INDEF had advised the government to create an independent institution directly under the supervision of the President to focus on the preparation and implementation of the land reform. (hol)