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Indonesia Land Use and Ownership
Roughly 20 million hectares, or nearly 10 percent of
Indonesia's total land area, were cultivated in the 1980s,
with an
additional 40 million hectares of potentially cultivatable
land,
primarily in Sumatra and Kalimantan. Smallholder
cultivation of
both food and estate crops predominated, accounting for
about 87
percent of total land under cultivation; large plantations
accounted for the remaining 13 percent. The pattern of
cultivation
and landholding in modern Indonesia reflected the
distinctive
natural ecosystems of Java and the
Outer Islands (see Glossary),
and the profound impact of colonial agricultural
practices.
Java was the center of intensive rice cultivation on
sawah or flooded cropland. This cultivation
demanded rich
volcanic soils and a fairly low gradient to permit water
control,
and supported a dense sedentary population. The Outer
Islands
ecosystem of swidden, a type of dryland agriculture known
also as
slash-and-burn agriculture, was practiced on the less
fertile
forested land with a diverse range of crops such as
cassava, corn,
yams, dry rice, other vegetables, and fruits. Small forest
plots
were cleared, harvested for a few seasons, and then
permitted to
return to forest. Because of the far lower productivity
per hectare
of land than sawah, swidden cultivation could only
support
low population densities. However, swidden farmers were
also able
to adopt commercial tree crops such as rubber and coffee
and were
the major suppliers of these important agricultural
exports
(see Estate Crops
, this ch.) Java supplied most rice and
through
intercropping on sawah and cultivation on
unirrigated land,
most other major food crops.
In his classic study Agricultural Involution,
anthropologist Clifford Geertz has given the most eloquent
interpretation of the impact of colonial agricultural
practices. In
the late nineteenth century, agricultural "involution"--a
reduction
to former size--was centered in areas of Dutch sugar
cultivation,
primarily in Central and East Java. Here, the dense
population
supplied seasonal labor for sugar fields and mills and was
still
able to grow sufficient rice, even though the most fertile
land was
devoted to sugar cultivation. The village economy provided
an
equitable if marginal subsistence for all villagers
through such
labor-intensive techniques as double cropping, improved
terracing,
careful weeding, and harvesting with small finger-held
blades
rather than sickles. These practices continued through the
early
1900s, a time when many rice-based agricultural economies
such as
Japan were increasing labor productivity in rice farming,
a
practice that released peasant labor for employment in
more rapidly
growing industries. On Java, the village rice-based
economy
experienced "involution," the absorption of a rapidly
growing
population that had limited outside opportunities in the
foreigncontrolled plantation economy.
On the Outer Islands, the Dutch plantation economy was
far less
intrusive, coexisting as an enclave among the small-scale
swidden
cultivators. As a result of the sparse local populations,
foreign
planters had to import workers, usually Javanese or
Chinese. The
government of independent Indonesia confronted the task of
agricultural modernization with this difficult
inheritance. Densely
populated Java was far behind in rice technology, yet
improvements
in rice productivity per worker could have pushed millions
of
households out of their only source of livelihood. Vast
expanses of
land remained uncultivated on the Outer Islands, but
increasing
cultivation there was limited by the natural
characteristics of the
tropical forest.
Under Sukarno's leadership in the early 1960s, these
problems
were tackled with a highly visible yet ultimately
ineffective land
reform. The land reform was part of a larger and more
successful
effort to modernize the colonial legal system of
landownership.
Under the Dutch, a dual system of land laws permitted nonIndonesians to register and obtain title for lands on the
basis of
Western civil law principles, whereas Indonesian ownership
was
governed by adat (custom), based on unwritten
village
practices
(see Tradition and Multiethnicity
, ch. 2). The
dual
system was intended to protect peasants from the
alienation of
their land. However, the more flexible, communal-based
adat
system also permitted the Dutch to rent communal village
lands for
sugar cultivation by contracting only with the village
headman
(penghula). In 1960 the proportion of settled land
still
recognized only under the adat system, with no
formal survey
or title, was 95 percent.
The Basic Agrarian Law, enacted in 1960, was a
comprehensive
legal effort to modernize Indonesian landownership. The
law
recognized previous ownership rights under both
adat and
Western systems, but provided a new certification process
under
which land was to be surveyed, mapped, and registered. All
unclaimed land reverted to government ownership. Land
certification, however, was not compulsory and
registration was
still far from complete by the end of the 1980s. The law
also set
limits on the size of landownership, depending on the
population
density of the region and the type of land. In areas with
over 401
people per square kilometer, rice fields were limited to a
maximum
of five hectares and a minimum of two hectares. Absentee
ownership
was forbidden.
Some concentration of landownership had followed the
collapse
of the colonial sugar cultivation system on Java, but in
essence
the problem was one of land shortage, not distribution. By
the
standards of sawah cultivation, a wealthy
landholder
possessed three to five hectares, so the maximum of five
hectares
left very little surplus land. Only a small amount of land
was
redistributed before Suharto's New Order shifted the
emphasis of
agricultural policy away from land reform towards
increasing
production. The 1983 agricultural census showed that about
44
percent of all farm households were either landless or
operated
holdings too small to meet more than subsistence
requirements. The
average landholding on Java was 0.66 hectares, and ranged
from
about 1.5 to 3 hectares in other parts of the archipelago.
By the 1980s, the New Order had achieved undisputed
success in
expanding rice production, but the distribution of
benefits among
villagers was still debated. Some observers suggested that
only
already prosperous farmers benefited from the new
technology.
Disputes continued in part because conditions varied in
different
parts of Java, yielding different results in village-level
studies.
However, by the late 1980s, sufficient evidence had been
gathered
to show that the benefits from increased rice production,
together
with growing employment opportunities outside agriculture,
had
reached even the landless or near landless population
(see Employment and Income
, this ch.).
Data as of November 1992
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