Jakarta. When presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto spoke of his “Big Push Strategy,” which entails the opening up of 4 million hectares of land in Indonesia for agriculture and bioethanol production during last Sunday’s candidate debate, the plan’s magnitude appeared to dwarf those that opponent Joko Widodo laid out during the debate.
Few people know about Joko’s plan called Indonesia Sejahtera (Prosperous Indonesia). In a document submitted to the General Election Commission, Joko mentioned a plan very similar in nature to Prabowo’s massive agriculture scheme.
In fact, Joko’s Indonesia Sejahtera plan is double the magnitude of Prabowo’s Big Push Strategy. It calls for the development of 9 million hectares and includes land reform and a land ownership program for farmers. The document said Joko’s ultimate aim was to boost Indonesia’s agricultural yield.
The fact that Joko’s Indonesia Sejahtera plan is little touted is due to a campaign strategy decision. Imam Sugema, a lecturer from the Indonesian Agricultural Institute who is part of the Megawati Institute, Joko’s think tank, said that the plan was hardly mentioned during the debate and campaign rallies because it is considered too complex to be widely understood.
“In campaigning, we have to select [policies] that can be easily understood,” Imam told the Jakarta Globe. He added, however, that Joko is keen on the project. “Pak Jokowi … wants this and is enthusiastic about this. We have plans, we just need to go on to implement them,” he said, referring to Joko by his nickname.
Naive plans
Prabowo and Joko’s sweeping agricultural plans seem quite similar in their assumptions. Both intend to make use of “degraded forest lands that are neglected by owners,” to improve Indonesia’s agricultural yield.
“These 9 million hectares are unoccupied, degraded lands. Don’t think that we will cut down forests for this,” Imam said. Both candidates claim that there should be no environmental concerns with repurposing such “degraded” land.
Imam said that currently, Indonesia has 22 million hectares of such land scattered across 34 provinces. The plan calls for the land to be given to poor farmers who will subsequently develop the land for agricultural purposes.
This would entail large-scale cooperation between the central government and regional governments to first identify land that can be used.
Then, transmigration will be encouraged to move farmers onto the land from elsewhere around the country — despite Indonesia’s disastrous experience with such schemes leading to massive environmental damage and bloody ethnic conflicts. Imam, however, argued that regional governments are keen.
“The regional governments want to develop their areas, they have the incentive of wanting a more developed region,” he said.
“Pak Jokowi came to South Sulawesi before the campaign period … the government there expressed its enthusiasm, they are ready to give out 1 million hectares to be made into paddy fields,” he said.
Moving farmers from one area to another has proven disastrous in the past, for both the farmers and on the land they tilled. (Reuters Photo/Beawiharta)
Bad precedent
Imam said that he was aware that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had announced similar plans, but seemed uninformed about why the president ultimately did not pursue the idea further.
“He has the program since 2004, but I don’t know why SBY did not implement it. We already have the map of the location of the land,” he said.
Yudhoyono did indeed have a similar plan as the two presidential hopefuls. Hermanto Siregar, a member of the National Committee on the Economy and an economic adviser to the president told the Globe that during his term, Yudhoyono had a land reform plan that aimed to give out 6.15 million hectares to poor farmers.
In 2010, it was reported that the president was moved to tears after he handed out 260 hectares to 5,100 farmers in Central Java. Farmers from Cilacap Village, for instance, each received about half a hectare. He was touched to see that “farmers who had nothing” could now have something to live on.
But the program was not a success by most accounts. The Yudhoyono administration only managed to meet about 10 percent of its own target of 6.15 million hectares.
“It is not easy, our experience shows that there are many limitations to the plan. We managed to cover only about 700,000 hectares of land in five years. And to us, that was already doing well,” Hermanto said. “The target was 6.15 million hectares. Some for paddy fields and some for bioethanol [production], but not much was realized.”
Hermanto warned the two presidential candidates have to be fully aware that the land reform and agricultural plans which lie at the heart of their campaign promises are enormously difficult to implement.
“On paper, you see a lot of land that you think can be given out to people, but the reality is that much of it is already owned,” Hermanto said.
Indigenous and local peoples as well as businesses are among those that claim ownership to lands marked as unoccupied by vague central government maps.
“There are important criteria for a plan like this to succeed. Firstly, the land has to be clean … clean in terms of ownership,” Hermanto said.
Another problem is that much of the land is not necessarily usable for rice or bioethanol plantations, or indeed most agricultural purposes, as many transmigrant farmers discovered during previous government programs. After suffering further damage through attempts to drain or till land, much of it was abandoned in a worse environmental condition than before.
Anton Apriyantono, former minister of agriculture from 2004-09 in the Yudhoyono administration told the Globe that land which the two presidential candidates’ plans assume is up for grabs is in reality not free.
Anton said that initially the government believed that it can take away degraded forest lands owned by corporations, lands that are no longer used. But they were wrong.
“The problem lies in the realization, it is very difficult to free up lands that have already been legally owned by individuals or corporations … even though they were already badly degraded and unoccupied, nothing could be done,” Anton said. “If the law is not revised, existing laws will obstruct the process. It will take until doomsday to get it done.”
As such, he urged the candidates to be realistic about their plans.
“Your ambitions must not be too massive in this area,” Anton said.
A farmer clears weeds at a rice field in Cianjur, West Java province on June 12, 2014. Presidential hopefuls Prabowo Subianto and Joko Widodo have plans for agricultural reform, but analysts warn of pitfalls including deviating from industrialization. (Reuters Photo/Beawiharta)
De-industrialization
Bank Central Asia’s chief economist, David Sumual, said that the presidential candidates’ grand agricultural plans were only to be expected, since they have significant populist appeal that the candidates badly need in order to win votes.
“There are about 38 million Indonesians who work in the agriculture sector. Our people are agricultural, so these campaign themes are very attractive to them,” he said.
On the other hand, David said that the move will push Indonesia further away from developed nation status. Indonesia is making the wrong move by focusing more on agriculture than the manufacturing sector, he said.
David said Indonesia was facing a phenomenon called de-industrialization, where the contribution by the manufacturing industry to Indonesia’s gross domestic product is falling compared to past levels.
“There is an ongoing de-industrialization in Indonesia. Back in the New Order era, the manufacturing industry made up 30 percent of Indonesia’s GDP. Today, in the first quarter of 2014, it makes up only 23 percent,” David said.
“How can we expect to become an upper-middle income country? Japan, Korea and China all developed because they focused on the manufacturing sector. Practically speaking, the value-added-ness of the manufacturing sector far outstretches the other sectors,” he said.
“And we are focusing on basic agriculture, not even agribusiness. It has low value-added-ness,” David said. “We are losing the opportunity to grow more.”
He added that he fears the candidates’ plans will have a regressive effect on the Indonesian economy.
In the same vein, a Harvard-educated economist working at the University of Indonesia, Mayling-Oei Gardiner, said that Indonesia has to look beyond agriculture if it wants to alleviate poverty.
“I’m not sure it would work,” Mayling told the Globe.
“If you want to get out of poverty, you have to get out of agriculture, it does not improve welfare,” she said. “Growth can be made through industrialization, look at China, they have eradicated poverty.”
Anton Apriyantono says that even if Indonesia plans to reorient itself more toward agriculture, it has a long way to go.
“This nation seems vast and spacious, but actually it is its sea that is vast,” he said.
“You must know that the per capita agricultural area in Indonesia is only a third of the world’s average. It is the same as Bangladesh’s, it is far below Thailand’s and Vietnam’s,” Anton said, referring to two countries from which Indonesia currently imports rice.
By Josua Gantan on 12:35 am Jun 20, 2014
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