Noer Fauzi Rachman*)
A paper for “Indonesia National Workshop on Sustainable Development Goals”, Coordinating Ministry for People’s Welfare, Government of Indonesia. May 28-29, 2012. Ramada Bintang Bali Resort, Kuta, Denpasar, Indonesia.
Dalam versi yang berbeda dimuat dalam Jakarta Post, June 12, 2012, dengan judul "Rio+20 and Indonesia’s land reform agenda" https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/06/12/rio20-and-indonesia-s-land-reform-agenda.html
The country must review of all national and international instruments intended to guarantee access to and retention of land by rural poor! Why?
Land rights is conspicuously absent from the agenda of next month’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil. We should review on its preparatory text titled “Current Ideas on Sustainable Development Goals and Indicators” RIO 2012 Issues Briefs, produced by the UNCSD Secretariat No. 6.[1]
I took the liberty to discuss the text from UNCSD above with that of Veit and Ranganathan (2012) “Why Land Rights Should Be On The Rio+20 Agenda” WRI Insights (http://insights.wri.org/news/2012/05/why-land-rights-should-be-rio20-agenda). I would like to stress out that in fact, only one line in the 29 March draft of The Future We Want, the principle outcome document for Rio+20, touches on land rights. The only reference is —“avoid creating food and water insecurities and limiting access to land, particularly for the poor”—has already been opposed by a number of developed nations, including the United States and the European Union.”
The fact about land rights issues in WSSD 2002 (Rio+10)
After a continuous strong demand from civil society groups, including mass rally from Alexandria to Sandton in Johannesburg, the official delegates of World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) agreed to adopt land issues in several sections of the official documents. This includes:
In the section of “Plan of Implementation”, paragraph 7c, we can find the following clear statement:
“Develop national programmes for sustainable development and local and community development, where appropriate within country-owned poverty reduction strategies, to promote the empowerment of people living in poverty and their organizations. These programmes should reflect their priorities and enable them to increase access to productive resources, public services and institutions, in particular land, waters, employment opportunities, credit, education and health;
Also in Paragraph 7(h)
“Provide access to agricultural resources for people living in poverty, especially women and indigenous community, and promote, as appropriate, land tenure arrangements that recognize and protect indigenous and common property resource management systems.”
Those are two excerpts, and there are more of those.[2]
My presentation will demonstrate the centrality of progressive ideas from social activism to policies, and the condition that make it possible, including “the politic and poetic of wordings”, as exemplified in my participation at WSSD as part of Indonesian social movement scholar-activists, and civil society delegation from International Land Coalition (ILC).[3]
Why promoting the land rights agendas in the Rio+20?
My broad and deep engagement within the social movement activism and literature in Agrarian studies has brought me to a conclusive lesson that rural poverty is not a condition, but a consequence of various forces that make rural people living in poverty. Rural poverty is a causal effect phenomena which needs relational understanding to capture. The relational approach understands persistent poverty as the consequence of historically developed economic and political relations, as opposed to ‘residual’ approaches which might regard poverty as the result of being marginal to similar relations. This relational approach examines poverty as an outcome of the historical and contemporary dynamics of capitalism, drawing attention to relations of accumulation, dispossession, differentiation and exploitation, and investigate the social mechanisms, categories and identities which perpetuate inequality and stabilize or facilitate relations of exploitation.
Let me zoom in on Indonesia experience after the fall of authoritarian regime during Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998, and the implementation of decentralization policy started in 2000. We have observed the increasing dramatic land use changes in diverse localities of Indonesia archipelago related to land/forest/coastal/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. The massive capital accumulation at diverse localities in Indonesian archipelago, basically, is geared up by concessionary policies of sectoral government institutions. The concessions for global commodity production enclosed huge amounts of lands and limited local people’s access to the land, forest, and territory. Those dramatics land use changes also coincide with the 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 the smallholders, landless peasants, rural poor are often dispossessed from their means of social subsistence which often led them to the chronic poverty and persistent agrarian conflict.
Based on those concerns, the aim of this presentation is to demonstrate and analyze the relations between Indonesian agrarian policies of land/forest/coastal/mining concessions, the space for capital accumulation, and land use changes in Indonesia’s diverse localities. My position is to promote secured access to land for rural citizens. As framed by 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. Inadequate rights of access to land, and insecure tenure of those rights, often result 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”.
Land tenure reform to create the strong land rights is the essential agenda for sustainable development. On the other hand, in dealing with the very skewed land structure, the land redistribution is also another important agenda to ensure access to land for all rural poor.
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 community to recover from shocks and adjust to changing circumstances. Sustainable assets like access to land and natural resources help to increase this 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. Rural poor people are more likely to invest in improving their land, including through soil protection measures, improving land use, and planting trees if they have secure tenure 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 hold onto their land and natural resources when threatened with loss of access or what popularly named “land grab” (or land expropriation).
*) Noer Fauzi Rachman got PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in the field of environmental science, policy and management. He teaches “Agrarian Politics and Movements” at Department of Communication Sciences and Community Development, Faculty of Human Ecology, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB). He is also the Director of the Bogor based Sajogyo Institute, and advisor in Environmental and Economic Governance Program, Partnership for Governance Reform.
[1] http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/content/documents/218Issues%20Brief%206%20- %20SDGs%20and%20Indicators_Final%20Final%20clean.pdf (last accessed May 27, 2012)
[2] See the full list related: Paragraph 7(c ), Paragraph 7(d); Paragraph 7 (h), Paragraph 10, Paragraph 10(f); Paragraph 11; Paragraph 11(a); Paragraph 40; Paragraph 40(d); Paragraph 40 (I); Paragraph 65, Paragraph 65(b).
[3] I was the chairperson of Consortium for Agrarian Reform (Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria/KPA), a national wide NGO network to promote land reform ideas rooted in localized struggles for land in Indonesian archipelago. KPA is a founding member of International Land Coalition (ILC), which is a global alliance of intergovernmental, governmental and civil-society organization that works together with the rural poor to increase their secure access to natural resources, especially land, and to enable them to participate in directly in policy and decision-making processes that affect their livelihood at local, national, regional and international level.
No comments:
Post a Comment