Transmigrants to be used for green work

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government plans to revive the transmigration program shut down 13 years ago so it can push forward with its current reforestation drive.

Forestry Minister Malam Sambat Kaban said Tuesday the ongoing forest rehabilitation and conservation efforts had met with a labor shortage and expected transmigration, organized in cooperation with the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry, to provide the human resources needed.

"Under the program, migrants and locals, will be able to benefit from the planting of commercial timber to rehabilitate land degraded by illegal logging, over-farming and other activities," Kaban told the opening of a joint meeting session with the Manpower Ministry.

The government launched its reforestation program early this year, with the aim to rehabilitate around 50 million hectares of damaged forest across Indonesia. It intends to plant the degraded land with fast growing tree species, like acacia, which can be harvested for timber after five to seven years.

The Manpower Ministry plans to send some 150,000 families to 436 locations in a number of forests in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. The two-day meeting aims to ascertain the status of 39 locations from a list of areas targeted for replanting, inside conservation and productive forests.

Manpower Minister Erman Suparno said his ministry had initially listed the 39 locations as potential destinations on the basis of suggestions from local administrations, while further investigation revealed they were areas under the control of the Forestry Ministry.

"The joint meeting will discuss the land status in the 39 locations and whether to drop any of them from the destination list or to grant migrants land use concessions there, instead of land possession," he said.

He added that the status of the land should be clarified before sending any migrants to prevent possible conflicts like those which occurred previously in the transmigration program when overlapping land claims arose.

The transmigration program, which was initiated in 1950 under the Soekarno administration and escalated during Soeharto's New Order regime, aimed at producing an evenly distributed population.

Under the program, residents from densely populated provinces were relocated to sparsely settled areas. Land for farming, housing and several years of living expenses were provided by the government.

According to data from 2000, 59 percent of Indonesia's population (of around 200 million) live in Java.

The Manpower Ministry has set an annual target to send around 150,000 migrant families, mostly unemployed and poor, amid criticisms the scheme involves the mass movement of poverty from one region to another.

Minister Erman said cooperating with the Forestry Ministry would address the weaknesses in the previous resettlement programs owing to the lack of job opportunities in relocation areas.

Soeryo Adiwibowo, a researcher from the Department of Communication and Community Development at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, said the resettlement plan was not likely to run well.

"Most migrants are used to rice farming in their hometowns and do not have skills to plant a forest," he told The Jakarta Post.

"There are a lot things to do before sending them to the forests and I think the government has failed to take these things into account. We can see from previous resettlements in which many were met with failure," he said. (lln)