Agrarian law in retrospect

The Agrarian Law enacted in September 1960 is one of the masterpieces in the history of the nation's legislative body.

The law has virtually turned the discriminative Dutch colonial law on land upside down. The question is, is the law still relevant today?

This question is more pertinent because land-related cases are becoming more complex as the agrarian minister himself said last week.

Land-related cases today are not only more complex but worse still, they have developed in such a way that they threaten to make the land management concept and ideals bred 34 years ago irrelevant.

One of the ideals was 'democratization' of land usage including the certainty of land ownership by the farmers.

Today we observe that certain individuals could have control over hundreds or even millions of hectares of land. On the other hand the number of farmers who own land is decreasing.

These realities indicate that the ideals of the Agrarian Law have not been materialized. It is not an exaggeration to say that today's problems on land ownership had never been visualized by our legislators in the 1960s.

The legislators might have based their thinking on an agrarian state whereas we have been rapidly moving into an industrial one.

We believe it is time to do something with the Agrarian Law. If we do not want to change it, at least new implementation directive rulings should be issued to help stem deviation tendencies.

-- Suara Pembaruan, Jakarta