Wahyoe Boediwardhana, Malang – A national land reform program aimed at redistributing state land to the poor has run up against a major obstacle: most of the land targeted in the program is outside of Java, which is exactly where most of the poor live.

National Land Agency (BPN) head Joyo Witono said Monday that plans to redistribute 9.25 million hectares of land by 2015 would have to involve academics "to help seek a suitable design for the plan".

He said the main problem was that most of the poor are in Java while most of the land to be distributed lies outside Java. And while most of the land is outside of Java, Joyo said officials did not want to move large numbers of people to other islands.

The New Order-era transmigration program now enjoys a largely bad reputation. Many of the poor people who were moved from Java to outer islands under the program complained of being given unproductive land and never receiving the necessary infrastructure and support to succeed in their new homes.

Speaking at Brawijaya University here, Joyo said participants in the program, unveiled by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last year, would be drawn from among landless poor farmers living in designated locations.

The program, he said, "should not be just about redistributing land. What we want is for people to develop and improve their standards of living."

Of the 9.25 million hectares in the program, Joyo said 8.15 million hectares were located in 102 regencies across 17 provinces outside of Java. The majority of the country's poor are in Java, followed by Sumatra and Sulawesi.

The government has already distributed 1.159 million hectares of land to 1.2 million people, with each person receiving an average of 1.77 hectares, he said.

The land reform program is based on a law passed in 1960. However, because the main political sponsor of that law was the now-banned Indonesian Communist Party it has in the past received little political support.

Now "the middle class and leaders of Islamic boarding schools would unlikely support the redistribution of big plots of land", researcher Isono Sadoko of the Akatiga Social Research Center in Bandung said Monday.

However, Golkar legislator Ferry Mursyidan Baldan praised the program as an effort to reduce poverty.

"The program will give farmers legal certainty as they will get land certificates. These certificates can be used as collateral for bank loans when the farmers need money to cultivate their land," he said.

Ferry also asked the government not to charge program participants fees for the land certificates.

Acknowledging there might not be enough land for all of the country's poor, Ferry said the government should pursue the program and assess the need for additional land.

Isono said the government still needed to clarify the details of the program.

If the government distributes land on former plantations that are no longer attractive to the state, this could be a burden to the poor regarding the production and marketing of their agricultural products, Isono said.

Isono, who is also a researcher with the World Bank, said a comprehensive land reform program must address issues such as production and marketing, apart from requiring strong political support and solid land management. "We're not even quite clear yet what this land reform concept is," Isono said Monday.

"The President and Joyo may be serious," Isono said, "but the BPN is not performing well." He said one of the main weaknesses was the lack of comprehensive data on both the land and the number of poor.

Although the President had hoped that the program would officially begin this April, Joyo said a Cabinet meeting first needed to be held to discuss the matter.

Isono said land redistribution could succeed, pointing out that about 70 percent of the land in the country is claimed by the state, mostly in the form of state plantations.

"So there is the potential of redistribution without disrupting non-state owned land" through the rearrangement of plantations, Isono said. Ownership of this state land can be transferred to individuals, on the condition that they not resell the land, and also with clear mechanisms for sharing the profit from the land.

"The owners will then work hard on the land and guard the area against theft, knowing the profits for exports," Isono said.

Joyo said the total budget for the program is estimated at Rp 396 trillion, with the money coming from the state budget, the banking sector and other sources.