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)