Effects of farmers' land tenure variations on their land use around Kerinci Seblat National Park, West Sumatra, Indonesia

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Abstract

The insecurity of farmers’ land tenure rights are thought to bring about resource degradation and low crop productivity in tropical areas. Private property rights are therefore expected to optimize farmers’ land use by allowing the usage of perennial crops that will increase land privatization for longer growing periods. This article discusses the effects of community property regimes on land use by examining a case study from West Sumatra, Indonesia.<BR> Farmers of the study area grow rice, non-rice food crops, and tree crops on community, lineage, family, and private land. Family and private land are dominant nowadays, while community or lineage land control is declining. Despite their preference for new, private land in forested areas, however, local Minangkabau farmers maintain joint ownership of their ancestral land through matrilineal inheritance as is the custom instead of privatizing it. Community leaders allow farmers who have familial inheritance rights to plant trees and other crops on every tenure type of land, because there is a separation of crop tenure and cultivation rights from land ownership rights. Crop productivity is similar between private land and common land in rice fields and dry-land farms, given similar biophysical and socio-economic conditions. Tree crops and idle bushy land occur on both land tenure types.<BR> Private land ownership rights do not always lead to more investment in sustainable and efficient resource utilization in the study area. Local institutions also manage common resource pools to sustain the whole kinship group, including the poor. The principle problem is the continued degradation of natural resources caused by the decline in local institutional capability and the lack of technical innovation. Institutional restructuring of common forest resource management and technical interventions for agricultural intensification, not the privatization of the indigenous common property which will weaken communities’ control of land and resources, are crucial for the improvement of farmers’ land use.

Journal

  • Tropics

    Tropics 14 (3), 283-294, 2005

    JAPAN SOCIETY OF TROPICAL ECOLOGY

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