Agrarian conflict and violence towards peasants in Indonesia
When Indonesia achieved its independence in 1945, the agrarian structure was very imbalanced, with a heavy concentration of land ownership in a few hands, and a large landless and near landless rural majority. In an attempt to address the agrarian question in 1960, the Soekarnoos government developed an agrarian reform policy which was based on the new Basic Agrarian Law No. 5 (known as UUPA 1960). Unfortunately this attempt at agrarian reform did not achieve meaningful results, as implementation was halted by the new regime in 1967. Landlessness and land-poor status continued to be the norm. In 1983 the percentage of farmers controlling (owning or renting from other parties) land of less than 0,5 hectares was 40,8 %. In the next ten years, this percentage increased to 48,5 %, and the Agriculture Census in 2003 showed that the number of peasants with these micro farms grew to 56,5 % of the total of farm families in Indonesia. Today some 70% of farmers control only 13 % of the land, while 30 % of farmers control fully 87 % of farmland. Not unrelated to the agrarian problem is the growth of unemployment, now reaching 41 unemployed and underemployed people.
Event: A vision for the future : International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development
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