Controversial plantation bill to be endorsed soon
Zakki P. Hakim, Jakarta
House of Representatives Commission III for plantations, agriculture, forestry and fishery affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture approved a controversial plantation bill on Tuesday, which will likely be endorsed at a plenary session next Monday.
Commission III spokesperson Awal Kusumah claimed that the country's first ever plantation law, if endorsed, would provide legal certainty for the industry.
"It will protect the interest of small-scale farmers and boost investment in the agribusiness sector," Awal said on Tuesday.
But critics said that the bill, which was an initiative of the legislators, was more focused on protecting the interest of plantation companies at the expense of traditional landowners and small farmers.
"We cannot accept the plantation bill," Ivan Valentina Ageung, a senior official at the RACA Institute, told The Jakarta Post.
The RACA Institute and a number of other non-governmental organizations like the Working Group of National Independent Farmers and the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute have recently published a book to campaign against the bill.
One of the most contentious issues in the bill is a clause allowing plantation companies to obtain concession rights for up to 35 years.
"This means plantation companies would no longer just use the land but they'd be practically owners (of the land) if they were given such a lengthy concession period," Ivan said.
(Investors had actually demanded a concession period of more than 90 years like in Malaysia and China).
The bill also allows plantation companies to set up their own security guards to protect their assets. Critics also feat that it could encourage the formation of groups of thugs protecting land that is still in dispute with the traditional land owners.
Ivan said that instead of approving the controversial bill, the government should have reviewed all existing regulations and laws related to agrarian and natural resource affairs as it had not protected the interest of traditional land owners or traditional tribes.
"Traditional land owners need recognition from the government to protect their land from big plantation companies," he said.
Although the government launched a national program of land certification to help land owners across the country obtain legal documents for their assets, the program was not implemented properly, particularly in rural areas, leaving traditional land owners in those areas holding only girik (title of land ownerships) instead of certificates, said Ivan.
In most such disputes, girik never won against concession documents granted by the government to plantation companies, he said.
Minister of Agriculture Bungaran Saragih dismissed suggestion that the bill was aimed merely at protecting the interest of plantation firms.
"It is not for the interest of plantation companies, but for all parties in the industry," he said.
Bungaran however, said he was aware that small-scale farmers and traditional tribes and society's rights of land should be prioritized and that he agreed that there should be a law protecting their rights.
"However, we have not yet seen any draft regulating traditional tribes' land rights," he said.