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.