Universitas Gadjah Mada - Website of Academic Staffs

Land Inheritance System Must be Reformed 

| Subejo, Tokyo | Sat, August 29, 2009; 2:10 PM | Opinion |

Landholding has become a very crucial issue around the world. Land as basic resource for food production and has often been a source of conflict. The mechanism of land transfer determines its productivity and benefit to its owner. In Indonesia, traditional custom, religious law and formal state law mostly acknowledges that family members have equal rights to inherit property from their parents.

This is particularly relevant to farming families. Even in the era before Indonesia’s independence, rural people widely bequeathed family property including farm land, livestock, furniture and gold, to their offspring.

Initially, the redistribution of property, such as farm land, is intended to guarantee the next generation enough area to secure their daily needs.

After the inheriting generation has set up their new household, they are expected to be independent and capable of fulfilling their own needs with the resources bequeathed by their parents. They can try to accumulate additional resources through purchase of more land, crop sharing and or renting their land.

In practice this means that the size of land - more specifically of arable land - becomes smaller and smaller. For instance, if a grandparent has one hectare of rice field and four children, and the property is inherited equally, each child will get a quarter of a hectare.

If each child then has four children of their own and there is no additional accumulation of property, each child in the third generation will get less than 0.1 hectare each. This amount of land is not enough to support even a modest life. If there is no significant change of the inheritance system, the future of farming looks gloomy.

Data from the Indonesian Agricultural Census confirms the continuously decreasing amount of land owned by the average farmer. In the 10 years between 1993 and 2003, the average amount of farming land per household has decreased from 0.50 to 0.40 hectare.

This figure conceals the reality in farming communities. Over a million farming households are virtually landless and work as daily hired workers, their income dependant on the availability of seasonal work.

The remarkable distribution through inheritance system will obviously lead to increasingly smaller plots of land in the future.

Small plots of land are inefficient and less productive, meaning they are more likely to be converted for other, non-agricultural purposes. The mass conversion of farm land, especially in Java, where about one million hectares have been converted in the last 30 years, is connected to this process of ever smaller scale ownership.

Policy makers and development planners should be aware of this problem. If the current system of farming inheritance continues, it can be assumed that farming and food production will face very serious problems in the future.

The idea of reducing division and physical distribution of farm land, as practiced in Japan, should be considered. If a grandparent inherits one hectare of land, their succeeding generation should manage almost the same size of land.

A relatively large plot of land allows enough space and flexibility for a household to optimize their resources efficiently and has proved to be enough to meet daily needs and even to generate additional resources for the next generation.

The introduction and implementation of new policies relating to the inheritance of farm land is crucial. The government could offer credits to farmers to be used in lieu of the physical distribution of land. The money could be used as investment for the higher education of family members.

Family members with better education would hopefully easily get jobs outside the agriculture sector. The family could select one member to inherit the farm. This scenario could prevent the further division of farm land.

The average size of farm land is already too small. Therefore, the implementation of land reforms promised by SBY-JK some five years ago, should be quickly realized.

The smooth implementation of a new mechanism of land inheritance will ensure the sustainability of agricultural. Of course, reforming the inheritance system is not enough to revitalize the Indonesian agricultural sector, and must be complemented with other policies that offer incentives for farmers to improve productivity and quality.

The writer is a lecturer at Gadjah Mada University’s School of Agriculture, a PhD candidate at the University ofTokyo and chairman of the Indonesian Agricultural Science Association (IASA) - Japan.

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