Land reform needed to phase out poverty

Land reform needed to phase out poverty

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Nusa Dua, Bali

Indonesian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other
groups fighting for the rights of indigenous people strongly
urged the government to initiate land reform to break the cycle
of poverty and to eliminate the degradation of natural resources
in the country.

Hundreds of years of injustices to the people -- enforced by
the colonial occupation and the New Order regime -- over land
ownership have caused landlessness especially among rural
Indonesians.

Noer Fauzi from the NGO Coalition for Agrarian and Natural
Resources Governance Reforms said that since the New Order came
into power in the late l960s, it had appropriated land from the
people and claimed it as its own.

"The government grabbed people's land and claimed it as state
property. The new rights were then doled out to big industrial
companies," he said in a discussion here on Thursday.

As a result, companies were given control over a lot of land
and the right to manage and exploit forest areas for mining and
large-scale plantations, said Noer, who is also from the
Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA).

In l998, over 650 companies acquired forest concessions
totaling an area of about 48.3 million hectares. Every company
held at least 72,500 hectares, he said.

In 1999, around 561 companies controlled 52.5 million hectares
of land for mining.

In 2000, over 2,000 companies were operating big plantations
controlling a total area of 3.52 million hectares.

In contrast, the l993 agricultural census revealed that the
country's 19.71 million farmers only controlled a total of 17.14
million hectares of farm land, meaning that each one only had
0.87 hectares of land on average, Noer said.

The government's policies, which favored corporations, have
caused serious environmental damage and even conflicts with local
people, Noer said.

Den Upa Rombelayuk from the Archipelago Indigenous Peoples
Alliance said that the rightful owners of the land are the
indigenous people, not the state, and that the government has no
right to manage land without prior consultation with the people
who have lived on the land for thousands of years.

"The land has been handed down to us from generation to
generation for hundreds and even thousands of years, long before
there was a state of Indonesia," she argued.

The NGOs and indigenous people groups demanded the government
to reform the current unequal distribution of land as well as to
resolve all agrarian and natural resource management conflicts.

The government must also revise and improve agrarian-related
laws and regulations, and enact new principles in natural
resource management that referred to principles of justice,
sustainability and respect for people's rights.