Indonesia loses 1m ha of farmland

Indonesia loses 1m ha of farmland

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia has lost almost one million hectares
of its farmland over the past five years, a professor of
agriculture has said.

Bunasor Sanim, vice rector for finance and administration at
Bogor Agriculture Institute said yesterday that the farmland had
been converted to other uses such as industry, infrastructure,
human settlement and other urban development.

"About 50 to 60 percent of the converted farmland is in Java,"
he said after the opening of a seminar on Sustainable Agriculture
Development in the year 2020.

This caused great productivity losses in the farming sector
because the soil in Java was highly fertile, he said.

Land yield in other islands was not as high as that in Java,
he said, adding that it took between three hectares to four
hectares of land outside of Java to produce the same amount as
yielded by one hectare in Java, he said.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture the agricultural
sector contributed only about 16.8 percent of the gross domestic
product in 1994 but it employed 46.1 percent (or 37.9 million) of
the work force. (das)