'Farming remains subsistent activity'

JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Transmigration Siswono Yudohusodo said Indonesian agriculture development has yet to improve farmers' welfare because farming is still a subsistence activity rather than a profit-generating economic enterprise.

The Antara news agency quoted Siswono as saying in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, on Thursday that despite overall progress in agriculture and increases in income per capita, the number of poor, landless farmers is still high.

Indonesia now produces over 50 million of tons of rice per year and reached self-sufficiency in rice in 1984. It went back to importing in 1991.

"Our farmers have neither worked efficiently nor prospered from farming," Siswono said at the Panca Bhakti University. He was speaking about the importance of opening new farming areas, outside densely populated Java, as an "urgent strategic move" needed to deal with the problem of poor farmers.

"Our agriculture development has yet to motivate farmers to strive for prosperity," he said. He blamed the situation on, among other things, limited access to land ownership.

He said a great number of Indonesian farmers did not own land, let alone advanced farming technology.

A 1983 census on farming found there were 9,532,000 farmers that did not own land. Ten years later, the number of tenant farmers increased to 10,937,000.

In general, farmers are more prosperous than they were years ago, but workers in other sectors have fared even better, he said.

The average farmer has 0.2 hectares of land, but the amount of farming land converted into non-farming plots such as real and industrial estates, roads and dams, has been increasing over the years.

"With such a small piece of land, it's difficult for farmers to prosper and to work efficiently and productively," he said.

"Every year, 40,000 hectares of farm land is converted to other uses," he said. He estimated that by 2005, when Indonesia embarks on its eighth five-year development plan, the absolute number of farmers will have declined significantly.

He said the quality of farming can only be improved if subsistence farming is replaced with farming practices aimed toward economic development.

To correct the situation, agricultural development needs to be re-oriented from targeting production increases to increasing farmers' income.

"But what's more important is giving farmers more land," he said. "This policy has been implemented by almost all countries with successful agriculture development such as Netherlands, Australia, Argentine and Japan," he said. (swe)