Indonesia’s Migration Plan Has Money Woes

Indonesia is made up of 13,677 islands, but most of its 168 million people live on one--the island of Java, which represents only 7% of the nation’s land area.

For years, the government has been trying to move people to other islands to relieve overcrowding on Java and a few other densely populated islands, and at the same time develop uninhabited areas.

Since World War II, about 4 million people have transmigrated, and plans called for 65 million others to move in the next 20 years from Java and Bali, Madura and Lombok.

The plan has long been assailed in some quarters as inhumane and by environmentalists who feared that invaluable rain forests were being destroyed as land was cleared for farming.

Slower Schedule

Now the plan has run into another obstacle: The government can’t afford to keep it going according on schedule and will slow it down.

Falling oil prices and resultant budget cuts are the main reason.

Minister of Transmigration Martono said his staff of 30,000 is being cut.

Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and the 12th biggest producer of oil. But lower income from petroleum and a growing foreign debt were given as the reasons for a reduction in government spending from $346 million in 1985-86 to $195 million in 1986-87 and $66.5 million in 1987-88.

Budget Increased

The 1988-89 budget allocation was increased to $104 million, but the pace of transmigration of a few years ago is not likely to be kept up.

The Transmigration Ministry is expected to be merged with another department in the interests of economy, according to official sources.

Martono, who like most Indonesians uses only one name, has come under fire in Parliament for his handling of the program.

He was criticized late last year when he proposed that 16,000 empty houses built for settlers be written off as losses. He said they had been reclaimed by the rain forests and eaten by termites due to the lack of funds to send migrants to live in them.

Accepted Responsibility

He was later publicly summoned to the chief auditor’s office to account for funding of the houses. Martono readily accepted responsibility.

“If only we could have money,” he said, “the transmigration houses would have been rehabilitated instead of being written off.”

Foreign critics of transmigration have denounced it as everything from an environmental disaster to internal colonialism.

The Friends of the Earth organization claims that forest destruction will affect the quality of life not only in Indonesia but also in other countries. About 10% of the world’s 287 billion acres of tropical forest is in Indonesia, reputedly second only to Brazil’s Amazon.

Criticism Rejected

Survival International and other groups accuse Indonesia of trampling on the rights of existing inhabitants of the receiving islands by colonizing them with landless Javanese.

Martono rejects this criticism.

“Our critics start from a different basis,” he said, “that when one people goes to another it’s colonization. We say we’re one nation--it’s integration.”

He has described the effort as “the biggest humanitarian program in history.”

500,000 New Jobs

Transmigration officials claim it has created more than 500,000 jobs during the 1980-85 development plan and that new settlements produce 5% of the country’s rice.

The World Bank, which has provided more than $640 million for transmigration since 1972, defends the program’s overall objectives as sound.

Scaling back mass migration of farmers because of the financial squeeze coincided with belated realization that there were fundamental flaws in the program.

A World Bank analysis said that poor planning and hastily implemented settlements resulted in soil erosion, the stripping of land of nutrients and making the application of fertilizers generally ineffective.

Thousands Give Up

Many hapless pioneers have been left to fend for themselves on infertile soil, undrained swamps, steep hillsides and far from any market to sell their produce.

A government study found that a third were struggling on sites that were ecologically incapable of sustaining them.

Of the 790,000 Javanese relocated by 1975, officials said almost a third rejected life as pioneers. Since then tens of thousands of others have left, some to seek jobs in the nearest city while others returned to Java.

Settlers are given 5 to 12 acres of land, depending on location, after homesteading for five years. A one-year subsistance allowance, simple tools, seed and fertilizer are also provided.

Thin Topsoil

About 75% of the resettlement land was rain forest, which was left with very thin topsoil once cleared.

“It is essential to improve the quality of transmigration and learn from the mistakes of the past,” said Emil Salim, the minister of state for population and the environment. “In future we must select sites that take into account the natural carrying capacity of the land.”

Only about 10,000 families--50,000 people at the official figure of five per family--are expected to migrate this year, and no new settlements are being prepared.

Originally designed to ease overcrowding on Java, Bali, Madura and Lombok, transmigration is now intended to improve the living standards of settlers and to develop virgin tracts in the world’s largest archipelago.

30 Million Too Many

Java’s population is 100 million, and officials say that ideally it should have only 70 million people. Bali, Lombok and parts of Sumatra are less crowded. Now the fifth most-populous country, Indonesia’s population is likely to reach 320 million to 350 million in 50 years, according to some projections.

Of Indonesia’s 13,677 islands, 6,004 of them have names and about 4,000 are inhabited. Its total surface area, including the seas within its frontiers, is more than 1.8 million square miles, roughly the same size as the continental United States.

Mass resettlement began 83 years ago under the Dutch colonial government, when Indonesia was known as the Dutch East Indies. Javanese were shipped to Sumatra starting in 1905, with at least 600,000 conscripted as plantation workers.

The Dutch, who left in 1949, were moving about 40,000 people a year by 1940. Transmigration was interrupted by World War II but resumed when Indonesia became independent under President Sukarno.

By 1965 most of the good farm land was under cultivation. After 1966 planners concentrated their efforts on reclaiming swampland. Most resettlement in recent years has been in upland areas of Sumtra and Kalimantan (Borneo) on soils far less fertile than volcanic Java.