Inclusion, Exclusion and Agrarian Change: Experiences of Forest Land Redistribution in Indonesia

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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