The Passing of the Agrarian Law: How Should We Interpret It?

The Passing of the Agrarian Law: How Should We Interpret It?

The passing of the Agrarian Reform Regulation Law by the House of Representatives (DPR) on September 22, 2026, deserves to be read as an important event in the journey of Indonesia's agrarian policy. However, the meaning of this event would be too simplistic if placed only at two poles: as a final victory for farmers or as a legislative product to be suspected because its deliberation process was rapid.

A more proportional reading reveals something more important. Indonesia is attempting to rebuild the institutional architecture of agrarian reform by placing the issues of land tenure, ownership, use, and utilization within a more comprehensive legal framework. The success of this agenda remains dependent on the next stage: how the state translates norms into measurable policies and benefits that are truly received by the public.

There are at least three things to consider. First, the passing of the Law is not the end of agrarian reform, but a crucial change at the institutional level. The reason is that over the past few years, agrarian reform has actually had policy instruments in place. Presidential Regulation (Perpres) No. 62 of 2023 concerning the Acceleration of Agrarian Reform Implementation, for example, regulated five main strategies: asset legalization, land redistribution, economic empowerment of agrarian reform subjects, institutional strengthening, and public participation (Government of the Republic of Indonesia, 2023).

Therefore, it is inappropriate to understand the passing of the new Law as the point where the government seemingly just started implementing agrarian reform. It is more accurate to view the Law as an effort to elevate the legal and institutional degree of an agenda that had previously been running through various policy instruments.

Information from the Ministry of Finance regarding the agreed substance demonstrates this dimension. The new regulation covers the arrangement, control, and limitation of land tenure and ownership; prevention of concentration and reconcentration of land tenure; and determination of priority locations based on, among others, inequality of land tenure, agrarian conflicts, abandoned land, poverty, absentee land, and tenure exceeding maximum limits. Its priority subjects also include farmers, tenant farmers, farm laborers, fishers, indigenous peoples, women, and the poor (Ministry of Finance, 2026).

Thus, the measure of this Law's success should not stop at the question of whether the DPR has passed it. A far more substantive question is whether the institutional design and its derivative regulations are capable of making the arrangement of the agrarian structure more effective compared to existing mechanisms.

Second, the issue of smallholder farmers is indeed massive, but the numbers must be read correctly. La Via Campesina cited the Indonesian Peasant Union (SPI), which stated there are more than 16 million smallholder farmers who could benefit from the policy. Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data provides an even larger picture. The 2023 Agricultural Census recorded 27,802,434 farmers using agricultural land, and 17,251,432 of them are classified as smallholder (gurem) farmers---namely, farmers who control less than 0.5 hectares of agricultural land (BPS, 2023). These figures show that Indonesia's agrarian problem is not a marginal issue. It concerns the rural economic structure on a national scale.

However, we still need to be careful. Not all smallholder farmers are automatically subjects of land redistribution. The status as a smallholder farmer is a statistical category, while agrarian reform recipients are a policy and legal category. Therefore, the number of 17.25 million cannot be directly read as the number of people who will receive additional land. From this perspective, implementation becomes highly decisive. The state must be able to distinguish between issues of ownership, tenure, use, access to capital, productivity, land legality, conflicts, and redistribution needs. Additional land without economic access may produce administrative changes but does not always result in welfare changes. Perpres 62/2023 itself placed economic empowerment as one of the agrarian reform strategies (Government of the Republic of Indonesia, 2023). Farmers need not only land but also legal certainty, infrastructure, financing, technology, markets, production institutions, and protection from land tenure conflicts.

Third, the speed of legislation must be read alongside the long history of agrarian policy.

Factually, the final stage of the bill's deliberation did proceed very quickly. After entering the Priority National Legislation Program (Prolegnas) on August 24, 2026, the bill was passed as a DPR initiative bill on September 8 and was subsequently passed into Law on September 22. A number of civil society organizations assessed that the final-level discussions held from September 17 to 21 were too brief to guarantee meaningful public participation (Hukumonline, 2026).

This view is an important note, especially since agrarian law has a direct impact on the relationship between the state, society, business entities, indigenous communities, and land rights holders. However, calling the entire agrarian reform agenda a "rushed" product also requires caution. The bill emerged on top of agrarian issues that have been ongoing for decades, while the government already had Perpres 62/2023 and various previous redistribution and asset legalization programs. Even the DPR itself explained that the completion of the bill was intended to provide a stronger legal basis for long-standing land issues.

Thus, there are actually two facts that do not need to be contrasted. The final legislative process was indeed fast. But its policy object is not a new issue. The real challenge is ensuring that legislative acceleration does not result in implementation deceleration.

It is precisely after the passing that the harder work begins. The government must translate the Law into implementing regulations, institutions, land databases, mechanisms for identifying agrarian reform subjects and objects, conflict resolution procedures, and supervisory systems. SPI itself, in La Via Campesina's reporting, requested that implementing regulations be issued immediately, especially rules regarding the institution responsible for implementing agrarian reform.

Ultimately, agrarian reform should not be positioned as a narrative competition between the state and the civil society movement. Both actually have interests that converge at one point: ensuring that land can provide life certainty and better economic opportunities for the community. BPS data shows that 17.25 million farmers are still in the smallholder (gurem) category. This figure serves as both a reason to be serious and a reason to be realistic. Serious, because the issue involves millions of households and the rural economic structure. Realistic, because land redistribution does not automatically solve all farmer welfare issues.

Therefore, the success of the Agrarian Reform Regulation Law should not be measured by how quickly it was passed, nor is it sufficient to measure it by how much land is administratively distributed. A more substantive measure is whether land tenure concentration can be reduced, whether conflicts can be resolved more fairly, whether the public obtains certainty of rights, whether farmers have stronger economic access, and whether the organized land truly improves the welfare of its recipients.

By those measures, the passing on September 22, 2026, is not the finish line. It is an institutional change that opens a new phase.