| Abstract: |
| In recent years (after Indonesia’s1998 reforms), through a long process of
struggle between the Ministry of Forestry, the National Land Board, the
private sector, local government, and peasant movements there have been
some cases where upland peasant communities succeeded in being allocated
individual land rights from the forest converted areas under the public land
redistribution policy. For reasons of food security and bowing to pressure
for land by the landless peasants, the MoF gave a ‘green light’ to implement
land reform through land redistribution to the tillers on a small scale in several
densely populated areas of Indonesia in Java and Sumatra. The state
(forest) land redistribution here is a process of redistribution of so-called
state (forest) land to the tillers that are already cultivating the land in traditional
mixed farming. The ‘state’ lands redistributed to the peasants were
not an empty space, but land which has already been subject to an informal
tenure system and provides them with individual land ‘ownership’ (meaning:
land may be bought and sold, and transferred from one generation to the
next, even though it does not have formal private ownership status). |
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