Amid the government vision of agrarian reform, there is a need to rethink the actual impact of land certification for agricultural land. 

Instead of providing social security as originally envisioned, the PST-LP program can instead harm the societies it is intended to help. This is because various social-cultural backgrounds of societies do not necessarily conform to the program’s mind-set, that land can be owned by individuals.

Take Maluku. In Maluku society, land has never been owned by individuals, but instead by clans, negeri (villages) and soa (constitution of several clans). Individuals can own only trees, not land. Variations of this form of ownership are commonly found across Southeast Asia. 

Anthropologists such as Roy Ellen call this an arboreal-based subsistence economy, in which trees provide aut...

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