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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

Land for the People: The State and Agrarian

Conflict in Indonesia

Joe Studwell

To cite this article: Joe Studwell (2014) Land for the People: The State and Agrarian Conflict in Indonesia, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 50:2, 302-304, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2014.938421

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.938421

Published online: 30 Jul 2014.

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302 Book Reviews

implement the ambitious reform programs outlined in the study. The uncomfort-able truth is that the capacity of governments at all levels in Indonesia is tightly constrained. In rich, Western, OECD countries, national governments often spend well over $10,000 per person per year to deliver national programs. In contrast, in Indonesia the 2012 national budget allowed President Yudhoyono to spend around $600 per person. The resources available to district and provincial gov-ernments are even more constrained; in Central Java, for example, the 2012 pro -vincial budget provided for only $20 per person for a population of more than 30 million. Ambitious reform is dificult with such scarce resources.

It is puzzling, too, that the authors do not seem to have surveyed the rich Indonesian-language discussion of public policy in Indonesia. The thorough reference list of close to 400 items includes numerous English-language articles and reports on Indonesian policy but only one or two references to Indonesian- language materials.

In surveying the demands on Indonesia’s economy, the study concludes that a ‘transformative program of reform’ holds the best prospects for rapid, sustained, and equitable growth. The Harvard team presents a strong case, but their pro-posal is very bold. The incoming administration will most likely introduce more modest reforms.

Peter McCawley The Australian National University

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.938423

Land for the People: The State and Agrarian Conlict in Indonesia. Edited by Anton Lucas and Carol Warren. Athens, Ohio: Ohio

University Press, 2013. pp xx + 405. Paperback: $32.95.

This collection includes a series of useful papers about the Southeast Asian devel-opment policy that never quite happens: effective land reform and agricultural policy of the sort that primed high-yield household farming and superior devel-opment experiences in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. The focus is Indonesia, but many of the issues raised are painfully familiar in the Phil-ippines, Malaysia, and, of course, Thailand—a nation that has come close to a civil war undergirded by rural inequality and injustice. More than half a century on from the enactment of Indonesia’s Law 5/1960 on Basic Agrarian Principles, which was supposed to deliver a Northeast Asian–style revolution in agricultural productive relations, ineffectual land reform and path-dependent agricultural policy characterise Indonesia’s economic development.

Land for the People divides into three parts, although this division is not made explicit by the editors. The irst three chapters review the history of the agrar -ian law, the loopholes that meant it would never lead to wholesale land redistri-bution, the 1965 pogrom against the peasant-based, pro-land-reform Indonesian Communist Party, the retreat from land reform objectives under Soeharto, and the available survey evidence on trends in land ownership inequality. After 1971 the

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Book Reviews 303

Indonesian government allocated no further funds for land reform, even though the highly symbolic basic agrarian law was, and still is, on the statute book. Soe-harto’s Indonesia favoured the expansion of plantations. By 2003, the oficial decennial agricultural census showed that 36% of farm households had no land at all. While agricultural censuses and other, non-government surveys disagree about the degree of land distribution inequality, all sources concur that inequality has risen over time.

Encouraged by the World Bank and other consultants, in the 1980s and 1990s the Indonesian government refocused land policy on titling—the clariication of land ownership—as a means to support peasant interests. Compared with re distributing land, issuing ownership certiicates was relatively non-confronta -tional, and supported by a rising tide of ‘property rights’ theory associated with economists like Hernando de Soto. The Indonesian government (and others, like that of Thailand) was attracted to the apparent easy ix offered by titling projects. Titling, however, while far from pointless, could only ever be one element in an agricultural policy designed to maximise output and fully utilise rural labour. The land reforms of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan included clear title, but they included much more besides, from equitable collective marketing arrangements to state-led inancing support for the farming population.

Indonesia’s, and Southeast Asia’s, rural discontent, inequality, and poverty festered. Even in the 1990s, while Soeharto was still in power, land disputes and peasant anger were simmering. When Soeharto abdicated in 1998, land returned to the forefront of politics—unsurprising in a country where half the population still lives on farms. The second part of Land for the People contains six case stud-ies of land confrontation, analysing the manner in which different land conlicts have played out across the pre- and post-Soeharto eras. In each case—whether a Javanese golf course, a Sumatran oil palm plantation, or the horribly conceived ‘million hectare’ peat land development project in Kalimantan—the common man and woman were much emboldened by the fall of Soeharto. Land occu-pations, legal cases, and protests produced tangible gains for farmers, whether cash compensation for land lost or legal or de facto acceptance of land occu-pations. The gains, however, were always limited, and frequently of uncertain duration. The reason, as the case-study authors show, is that at the level of state land policy in Indonesia nothing fundamental changed. The third and inal part of the book, consisting of two chapters that explore national politics since 1998, explains why.

At irst blush, the concluding chapters note, there is much to be optimistic about in post-Soeharto Indonesia. The blossoming of civil society has probably been the country’s most notable change. Non-government organisations have proliferated, and nowhere more so than in the sphere of land disputes. The Indigenous Peo-ples Alliance of the Archipelago now defends the interests of the most margin-alised indigenous minorities. The Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions has become an assertive, proactive organisation. Local peasant groups in the regions are now organised and effective advocates for the poor, engaged in hundreds of cases across the archipelago. Unfortunately, however, an explosion of civil society groups has not been enough to produce a signiicant shift in national politics.

There has been no shortage of talk and promises. In 1999, a presidential decree ordered a review of land policy. In 2001 came a People’s Consultative Assembly

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304 Book Reviews

decree on agrarian reform, mandating a revised legal framework for land issues. But the laws and policies never arrived. As civil society groups struggled through the 2000s to push land issues to the top of the political agenda, President Yudhoy-ono in 2007 announced a National Agrarian Reform Plan as part of his campaign for re-election. The reform plan promised to redistribute much agricultural land. But, once more, little happened. Re-elected, Yudhoyono lost his enthusiasm for agricultural policy. As one of the concluding sections of Land for the People notes, ‘Successive governments in post–New Order elections continued to relegate the land issue to the “too hard” basket’.

In this sense, Indonesia’s combination of loud, usually empty political rheto-ric, more active civil-society groups, and only marginal practical changes in land tenure echoes the experience of the Philippines since the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The much-ballyhooed Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law passed by Cory Aquino’s government turned to be nothing more than a signpost to business as usual. Neither the Philippines nor Indonesia, in the wake of their its ‘people power’ political upheavals, produced a political party that mobilised the rural vote behind land reform and new agricultural policies. Only Thailand’s Thak-sin Shinawatra, a high-born tycoon, has mobilised the peasant vote in post-crisis Southeast Asia. And Thaksin was no harbinger of fundamental change, but rather a reminder of the dominance of urban elites and the interests of oligarch-led busi-ness in Southeast Asian politics.

Land For the People is an illuminating collection that deals with an expansive subject. Indeed, the editors might have done better to focus more narrowly on agricultural land. Two case-study chapters on slum clearances in Bandung and the decades-long dispute over tourist beachfront in Lombok’s Gili Trawangan are anecdotally colourful but delect from the central message that this is a book about Indonesia’s farming masses. In turn, it would have been helpful to have set out in one of the early chapters the economic arguments as to why small-scale, high-yield household farming can be so effective in poor countries. Sometimes the tone of the book becomes politically strident in a manner that detracts from the sound economic experience on which it is based.

Above all, Land for the People reminds us of the centrality of land issues in devel-oping countries generally—where the majority lives from the land—and of the unfortunate history of Southeast Asian countries’ failure to grapple effectively with land policy. The irst part of the book quotes the benchmark that Sukarno gave in 1960: ‘The Indonesian revolution without Land Reform is like a building without foundation, like a tree without a trunk, like big talk which is empty’. A decade later, Ferdinand Marcos said pretty much the same thing after declaring martial law in the Philippines and promising a ‘New Society’: ‘Land reform is the only gauge for the success or failure of the New Society… If land reform fails, there is no New Society’. The leaders of both countries—and even Thaksin more recently in Thailand—recognised the centrality of the land issue. But practice in Southeast Asia has never matched the big talk.

Joe Studwell Cambridge, United Kingdom