Peat land project faces housing crisis

Peat land project faces housing crisis

JAKARTA (JP): Building 3,000 houses in six months for
resettlers to farm the one million hectares allocated for a peat
agricultural land project in Central Kalimantan is becoming a
headache for the government.

Astri Surjanto, of the ministry of transmigration, said
yesterday that the 3,000 houses in Dadahup are supposed to be
completed by March 1997.

"As of now, only 600 houses have been built and we are having
problems with the funding for the rest," said Astri, who is in
charge of building houses for prospective farmers.

To add to his apprehension, in the next phase, that begins in
March and lasts 12 months, he is supposed to build another 20,000
houses in order to accommodate all the 250,000 people earmarked
for the Central Kalimantan megaproject.

"It is an especially difficult task because the building
materials can only be transported by river owing to insufficient
land infrastructure," Astri said.

The project, launched in February, involves converting
one million hectares of peat land in Central Kalimantan into
638,000 hectares of rice fields. The remaining 362,000 hectares
are to be used for horticulture, plantations, conservation areas,
housing and reservoirs.

Converting the peat moss area into agricultural land is meant
to compensate for the development of agricultural areas in Java
into housing complexes, industrial areas and highways over the
past 10 years.

The one-million-hectare peat moss land is the most expensive
development project this year; its cost is estimated at about Rp
5 billion (US$2.1 million). To convert a hectare of peat land
into agricultural land costs about Rp 5 million.

The government has already spent some Rp 527.2 billion
building the required infrastructure, including the irrigation
system.

The first phase of the project will include resettling some
1,000 families, mostly farmers from Java, to work on a miniature
project of 10,000 hectares scheduled to start in the 1997
planting season.

In general, the people running the housing project have had
problems obtaining building materials because only private forest
concessionaires have rights to supply wood, Astri said.

Houses on the peat land, according to Astri, are being
slightly modified to cope with the characteristics of the soft
soil. Developers are using lighter construction materials, such
as asbestos or aluminum.

Asbestos, once widely used in dozens of industrial
applications from insulation to car brakes, has been associated
for decades with cancer and other deadly diseases, primarily
respiratory ailments like lung cancer and asbestosis.

Asbestos-related ailments are particularly vexing to health
experts because people affected may show no signs of disease for
up to 40 years.

"We have not received any health hazard notices from the World
Health Organization or the Department of Health on the use of
asbestos," Astri said. (14)