29/03/2026
The worsening injustice in land ownership and access is inevitable as long as states and the largest imperialist powers continue to dominate, dividing the world economically and territorially among themselves. As financial oligarchs, imperialists establish and maintain semi-colonial and semi-feudal systems in agrarian or non-industrial countries rich in natural resources and cheap labor, by turning reactionary classes in those countries into their agents—serving financial capital in the form of debt capital and productive capital.
Agrarian countries that still rely on peasants as their main productive force, such as Indonesia, suffer deeply under imperialist domination. This is because imperialism deliberately preserves various forms of feudal exploitation: land rent and usury used to seize surplus product through its agents—the big landlords, who are often simultaneously comprador big bourgeoisie. The cultivation of export-oriented agricultural commodities as a backbone of state revenue, alongside extractive exports such as oil, gas, coal, and various minerals, further intensifies land rent and usurious exploitation of peasants due to the growing monopoly over land.
The crisis of landless peasants has worsened under the administration of President Prabowo Subianto. Policies and programs lacking a sound basis for expanding export-oriented agricultural production have resulted in brutal land grabbing practices at the beginning of his administration, under the guise of Forest Area and Mining Enforcement Operations and land provision for food through Food Estate Projects. Plans to further expand oil palm plantations—even after reaching 16 million hectares—not only seize smallholder peasants of their freedom and control over land and production, but also exacerbate deadly ecological disasters that have repeatedly occurred, claiming lives and destroying villages and farmlands.
In islands, provinces, and districts where oil palm plantations operate, the state and big landlords exploit the powerlessness of small peasants to independently produce food crops according to traditional local farming systems. Instead of empowering them, the government abandons them to landlords, encouraging the replacement of traditional crops with oil palm commodities through promises of subsidized inputs, less labor-intensive work, and more secure markets—even though the level of exploitation is severe. Through this process, millions of middle and poor peasant families have lost their autonomy and control over their own land.
Peasants also bear the heavy burden of exploitation and ecological destruction caused by the expansion of timber plantations for pulp and paper, as well as sugarcane plantations, which devastate remaining forest areas. Communal lands of minority ethnic groups across Indonesia are disappearing due to the expansion of imperialist financial capital operations, including under so-called “green investment” projects in agriculture and nickel mining to supply the electric vehicle industry.
The injustice in land ownership and access cannot be ended without dismantling imperialist domination and stopping its dictates over the ruling reactionary classes in semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries like Indonesia. Today, 61% of peasants control only 0.5 hectares of land, with inequality reaching an extremely high ratio—above 0.5. In 2022, the Gini ratio for agricultural land ownership ranged between 0.58–0.68. The Indonesian government, through Agrarian Minister Nusron Wahid, has acknowledged this extreme condition, even stating that 60 families controlled 46% of agricultural land in Indonesia in 2025. At the same time, an average of more than 200,000 landholding peasants lose their land and become landless every year.
Although on paper Indonesia has 192 million hectares of land—122 million hectares of forest, and 70 million hectares allocated for agriculture, settlements, industry, and other uses—peasants’ ownership and access to land have not fundamentally changed. Puppet governments that come and go consistently obstruct genuine land reform as a mechanism for equitable land access, instead promoting agricultural and plantation programs that continue to rely on and reinforce big landlords as the central force of land and capital control in rural areas. The “Koperasi Merah Putih” program currently being established in every village will act as a catalyst accelerating the wave of peasants trapped in usury.
The agrarian and industrial future of Indonesia will become even bleaker under the administration of President Prabowo Subianto, as the obstacles to genuine land reform are strong and multifaceted—unless met with significant resistance from a growing anti-feudal movement in the countryside, supported by an expanding anti-imperialist movement of militant workers and progressive intellectuals in urban areas.
Landless Day, commemorated on March 29 at the initiative of the Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), must continue to be amplified—not only as a reminder of the crisis of land monopoly on one side and landless peasants on the other, but as a moment to strengthen resolve and multiply the militant anti-feudal peasant movement across the vast rural areas of Indonesia.
Happy Landless Day!
Destroy the Monopoly of Land by Big Landlords!
Advance Genuine Land Reform as the Path to National and People’s Liberation from Imperialist Domination!
