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)