Rio+20
and Indonesia’s land reform agenda
Noer Fauzi Rachman ; PhD from the University of California,
Berkeley, in the field of environmental science, policy and management;
The director of the
Bogor-based Sajogyo Institute, An Advisor in the Environmental and Economic
Governance Program for Partnership for Governance Reform
SUMBER : JAKARTA
POST, 12 Juni 2012
Land reform is conspicuously absent from the
agenda of next month’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in
Brazil.
In fact only one line in the March 29 draft of “The Future We Want”, the principle outcome document for Rio+20, touches on land rights. In their study “Why Land Rights Should Be On The Rio+20 Agenda” Veit and Ranganathan (2012) said the only reference was to “avoid creating food and water insecurities and limiting access to land, particularly for the poor”, and this point has already been opposed by a number of developed nations, including the US and states within the European Union.
President Susilo Bambang Yu-dhoyono, together with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, will head a panel at Rio+20 to advise the UN on global sustainable development beyond 2015. I suggest the President, and the whole Indonesian delegation, bring land reform back into the official conversation and negotiate in producing a set of so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
At Rio+20, I imagine the strong demands for articulate land reform will be very strong. The forces that will endorse land reform agendas at Rio+20 will come from official delegates, especially Latin American and Southern African countries, international development agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and progressive civil society groups and social movements.
The right to land access is a crucial variable in producing or eradicating rural poverty, which is not a condition, but a consequence of various forces that push rural people to live in poverty.
Rural poverty is a causal effect phenomenon that needs relational understanding in order to be eradicated. The relational approach understands persistent poverty as the result of historically developed economic and political relations, as opposed to “residual” approaches that might regard poverty as the consequence of being marginal to similar relations.
This relational approach examines poverty as a product of the historical and contemporary dynamics of capitalism, drawing attention to relations of accumulation, dispossession, differentiation and exploitation, and investigating the social mechanisms, categories and identities that perpetuate inequality and stabilize or facilitate relations of
exploitation.
Zooming in on Indonesia’s experience after the fall of Soeharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998, and the implementation of decentralization policy introduced in 2000, we have observed increasing dramatic land use changes in diverse localities in the archipelago related to land, forest, coastal and mining concessions.
The drastic land use changes were mainly generated by the creation of new spaces for capital accumulation where new chains of production, circulation and consumption of global commodities are established.
Massive capital accumulation at diverse localities in Indonesia is geared up by the concessionary policies of sectoral government institutions. The concessions for global commodity production enclose huge amounts of land and limit local people’s access to land, forest and territory.
Those dramatic land use changes have also coincided with drastic land property relation changes, in terms of the direction of the transfer of effective control over land-based wealth and power caused by a policy (or absence of it), in which smallholders, landless peasants and the rural poor are often dispossessed from their means of social subsistence, which often leads them into chronic poverty and persistent agrarian conflicts.
My broad and deep learning through academic literature in agrarian studies has brought me to the conclusive lesson that the persistence of chronic poverty in relation to drastic land use changes and the creation of new spaces for capital accumulation are not unique for Indonesia.
Those are the post-colonial conditions of many countries, or to use a more politically correct term, those are the neo-colonial conditions by which the production of poverty and environmental destruction are direct consequences of a mainstream political-economic paradigm.
My position is to promote secure access to land for rural citizens. As framed by the FAO (2007), “access to land is a crucial factor in the eradication of food insecurity and rural poverty. The poorest are usually landless or land-poor.
“The inadequate right of access to land, and the insecure tenure of those rights, often results in entrenched poverty and are significant impediments to rural development and the alleviation of food insecurity.
“Secure access to land often provides a valuable safety net as a source of shelter, food and income in times of hardship, and a family’s land can be the last available resort in the instance of disaster”.
In the context of efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change that affect rural people, secure access to land is a key ingredient for strengthening the ability of communities to recover from shocks and adjust to changing circumstances.
Sustainable assets like access to land and natural resources help to increase the resilience of the poor through a valuable safety net as a source of shelter, food and income in times of hardship.
It is also generally accepted that land tenure is also essential for long term land management planning, which is important for mitigating climate change.
The rural poor are more likely to invest in improving their land, including through soil protection measures, improving land use and planting trees if they have secure tenures and can benefit from their investments and efforts. The landholders have confidence that they will reap the benefits from those investments. These benefits are central to improving local well-being and achieving sustainable development.
On the other hand, strong property rights help rural people to hold onto their land and natural resources when threatened with a loss of access, or what has been popularly named a “land grab” (land expropriation).
In fact only one line in the March 29 draft of “The Future We Want”, the principle outcome document for Rio+20, touches on land rights. In their study “Why Land Rights Should Be On The Rio+20 Agenda” Veit and Ranganathan (2012) said the only reference was to “avoid creating food and water insecurities and limiting access to land, particularly for the poor”, and this point has already been opposed by a number of developed nations, including the US and states within the European Union.
President Susilo Bambang Yu-dhoyono, together with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, will head a panel at Rio+20 to advise the UN on global sustainable development beyond 2015. I suggest the President, and the whole Indonesian delegation, bring land reform back into the official conversation and negotiate in producing a set of so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
At Rio+20, I imagine the strong demands for articulate land reform will be very strong. The forces that will endorse land reform agendas at Rio+20 will come from official delegates, especially Latin American and Southern African countries, international development agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and progressive civil society groups and social movements.
The right to land access is a crucial variable in producing or eradicating rural poverty, which is not a condition, but a consequence of various forces that push rural people to live in poverty.
Rural poverty is a causal effect phenomenon that needs relational understanding in order to be eradicated. The relational approach understands persistent poverty as the result of historically developed economic and political relations, as opposed to “residual” approaches that might regard poverty as the consequence of being marginal to similar relations.
This relational approach examines poverty as a product of the historical and contemporary dynamics of capitalism, drawing attention to relations of accumulation, dispossession, differentiation and exploitation, and investigating the social mechanisms, categories and identities that perpetuate inequality and stabilize or facilitate relations of
exploitation.
Zooming in on Indonesia’s experience after the fall of Soeharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998, and the implementation of decentralization policy introduced in 2000, we have observed increasing dramatic land use changes in diverse localities in the archipelago related to land, forest, coastal and mining concessions.
The drastic land use changes were mainly generated by the creation of new spaces for capital accumulation where new chains of production, circulation and consumption of global commodities are established.
Massive capital accumulation at diverse localities in Indonesia is geared up by the concessionary policies of sectoral government institutions. The concessions for global commodity production enclose huge amounts of land and limit local people’s access to land, forest and territory.
Those dramatic land use changes have also coincided with drastic land property relation changes, in terms of the direction of the transfer of effective control over land-based wealth and power caused by a policy (or absence of it), in which smallholders, landless peasants and the rural poor are often dispossessed from their means of social subsistence, which often leads them into chronic poverty and persistent agrarian conflicts.
My broad and deep learning through academic literature in agrarian studies has brought me to the conclusive lesson that the persistence of chronic poverty in relation to drastic land use changes and the creation of new spaces for capital accumulation are not unique for Indonesia.
Those are the post-colonial conditions of many countries, or to use a more politically correct term, those are the neo-colonial conditions by which the production of poverty and environmental destruction are direct consequences of a mainstream political-economic paradigm.
My position is to promote secure access to land for rural citizens. As framed by the FAO (2007), “access to land is a crucial factor in the eradication of food insecurity and rural poverty. The poorest are usually landless or land-poor.
“The inadequate right of access to land, and the insecure tenure of those rights, often results in entrenched poverty and are significant impediments to rural development and the alleviation of food insecurity.
“Secure access to land often provides a valuable safety net as a source of shelter, food and income in times of hardship, and a family’s land can be the last available resort in the instance of disaster”.
In the context of efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change that affect rural people, secure access to land is a key ingredient for strengthening the ability of communities to recover from shocks and adjust to changing circumstances.
Sustainable assets like access to land and natural resources help to increase the resilience of the poor through a valuable safety net as a source of shelter, food and income in times of hardship.
It is also generally accepted that land tenure is also essential for long term land management planning, which is important for mitigating climate change.
The rural poor are more likely to invest in improving their land, including through soil protection measures, improving land use and planting trees if they have secure tenures and can benefit from their investments and efforts. The landholders have confidence that they will reap the benefits from those investments. These benefits are central to improving local well-being and achieving sustainable development.
On the other hand, strong property rights help rural people to hold onto their land and natural resources when threatened with a loss of access, or what has been popularly named a “land grab” (land expropriation).
My conclusions are as follows. First, land
tenure reform to create strong land rights is essential for sustainable
development; second, in the context of very skewed land structure, land
redistribution is also important in ensuring access to land for the landless
and near-landless rural poor; and third, in dealing with pervasive and chronic
agrarian conflicts because of land grabs, land right restitution needs to be
seriously adopted.
Indonesia is responsible for promoting all three of these land reform agendas at Rio+20. ●
Indonesia is responsible for promoting all three of these land reform agendas at Rio+20. ●
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