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).
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.
The
writer holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in the
field of environmental science, policy and management, is the director
of the Bogor-based Sajogyo Institute, and is an advisor in the
Environmental and Economic Governance Program for Partnership for
Governance Reform
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