Twenty years, one gavel: what Indonesia's agrarian reform law means, and who made it happen

DK: Yes, many times, but we kept on fighting for it. For more than two decades, there were moments when we wondered whether this law would ever happen. Every time a new regime came to power, we had to face a new cycle of resistance, hesitation, or rejection of the Agrarian Reform Bill.

But interestingly, every rejection from successive regimes only strengthened our determination to keep pushing.

For KPA, this has never been a seasonal campaign. We consistently raised the demand for the Agrarian Reform Law every National Peasants' Day, during the formulation of the national legislative agenda, and through our continuous engagement with Parliament and the government. We kept reminding every government that Indonesia needed a strong legal framework to implement genuine agrarian reform nationally.

KPA also carried a clear organisational mandate. Our National Congresses repeatedly reaffirmed the relevance and urgency of an Agrarian Reform Law and mandated KPA to continue fighting for it. The aspirations and decisions of our National Congress became an important source of legitimacy and strength for our advocacy.

What kept us going was ultimately the peasants themselves. Every time we returned to the villages, we met peasants who had been fighting for their land for 10, 20, sometimes 30 years. Their persistence reminded us that we could not give up simply because the political process was slow.

For us, the Agrarian Reform Law was never the struggle itself. It is a political and legal instrument for a much larger struggle: transforming agrarian inequality and ensuring that land and natural resources are managed for the people.

So, after more than twenty years, our lesson is simple: a movement must have the patience of peasants. We plant, we nurture, we protect, and we wait for the harvest, but we never stop fighting for it.

DK: The acceleration was remarkable. But I would emphasise that the struggle did not begin one month before the law was passed. The political momentum had been building for years.

If we look specifically at the beginning of the new Prabowo administration, an important political momentum emerged on 24 September 2025, National Peasants' Day. On that day, KPA mobilised around 12,000 of its members to demonstrate in front of the Indonesian Parliament.

We came with a clear political agenda: 24 structural agrarian problems and nine fundamental changes that we believed were necessary if the government was serious about implementing genuine agrarian reform. This became widely known as our "24 = 9" campaign.

The fourth of those nine demands was the urgent passage of the Agrarian Reform Bill.

What was significant was that the leadership of Parliament, together with six ministers, came directly to meet the KPA mass action. At that moment, there was an agreement to establish a special body for implementing agrarian reform and a Special Committee for the Resolution of Agrarian Conflicts.

But after National Peasants' Day, we did not simply wait for those commitments to be implemented. KPA repeatedly pushed the process through discussions, hearings, meetings, and protests with the leadership of Parliament. In the middle of this situation, many of our members were being criminalised by police and corporations. We kept reminding them that agrarian reform could not move forward if the political and institutional machinery of government remained stuck.

As the ministers and the cabinet were not moving sufficiently to support the agrarian reform agenda, KPA returned to the leadership of Parliament on 11 August 2026. That meeting became another critical political moment.

It was there that the demand we had raised on National Peasants' Day was finally taken up by the leadership of Parliament: the Agrarian Reform Bill should move forward.

And the conditions were already there. We did not have to start from zero. KPA had been fighting for this legislation since 2004. We already had an academic paper, a draft bill, policy proposals, organisational mandates, research, and years of experience from agrarian conflicts across Indonesia. Substantively, we were ready.

The fact that it moved quickly was not because the problem suddenly appeared. Agrarian reform had been ignored for decades, while peasants had continued to suffer from land conflicts, dispossession, and inequality.

When a political opening finally emerged and met a persistent and organised peasants' movement, we were ready to move.

And once the decision was made to proceed, KPA stayed on the process every single day and did our advocacy directly in Parliament. We monitored the discussions, engaged with Parliament and the government, provided substance, pushed when the process slowed, criticised when the direction went wrong, and made sure that the momentum did not disappear.

So I would not describe the one-month process as a miracle. It was the acceleration of a struggle that had been built for more than twenty years.

Political opportunity matters. But political opportunity only becomes legislation when there is an organised movement capable of turning that opportunity into political pressure, policy substance, and ultimately legal change.

For us, the lesson is very clear: the speed of the final process should never be confused with the length of the struggle. The law took one month to pass, but it took more than twenty years to make that one month possible.

DK: ICARRD+20 in Cartagena, Colombia was an important moment because it reminded us that agrarian reform is not an old or purely national question. It is a global question connected to inequality, food systems, climate change, rural livelihoods, Indigenous Peoples' rights, and the future of peasant and rural communities.

For the Indonesian agrarian reform movement, ICARRD+20 also connected our long struggle with a broader global movement. We could see that peasants in Indonesia are facing challenges that are also experienced elsewhere: concentration of land, insecure tenure, agrarian conflicts, displacement, and policies that can place large-scale investment above the rights and livelihoods of rural communities.

But I also see ICARRD as an important future political momentum for Indonesia.

Indonesia is being considered to host a future ICARRD. If that happens, Indonesia should not merely host an international conference and speak about agrarian reform. Indonesia should be able to demonstrate concrete achievements in agrarian reform policy and, more importantly, in its implementation.

This is also something KPA has been emphasising to the Indonesian Parliament. We have told them that if Indonesia wants to take an important role internationally on agrarian reform, then we must first demonstrate progress at home. The passage of the Agrarian Reform Law is an important step, but it must be followed by real implementation.

For us, this creates a clear political responsibility: Indonesia should come to the international community not only with commitments, but with evidence of change on the ground.

That means showing progress in resolving agrarian conflicts, redistributing and restructuring land ownership, protecting peasants and Indigenous Peoples, strengthening women and rural communities, and ensuring that agrarian reform becomes an effective national policy.

So ICARRD+20 was important because it connected our national struggle to the global agenda. And the prospect of Indonesia hosting a future ICARRD gives us another opportunity, and another responsibility, to demonstrate that agrarian reform is not merely a political slogan, but a policy that can actually transform people's lives.

Implementation. There is no other answer.

For me, the single most important thing in the first year is to establish and make fully operational the National Agrarian Reform Agency (BRAN) mandated by this law.

BRAN is not simply another government institution. It is designed as a special institution with a national mandate to lead the implementation of agrarian reform in a coordinated and systemic way.

This is important because one of the biggest problems we have faced for decades is that agrarian reform has been fragmented among different ministries and government institutions. Each institution has its own sectoral interests, authorities, and policies. This sectoral ego has been one of the reasons why agrarian reform repeatedly reaches a deadlock.

BRAN must break that sectoral fragmentation.

And it must not become merely another government office where peasants come to submit complaints, only to have their cases referred back and forth between institutions, as has happened for many years.

BRAN must have the political authority and institutional capacity to resolve structural agrarian conflicts, coordinate agrarian reform across sectors, and ensure that decisions are actually implemented.

There is another very important change in this law: the approach of Priority Agrarian Reform Locations, or LPRA, which KPA has developed through years of organising and practice, has now been adopted into the legal framework.

This is significant because LPRA represents a different way of implementing agrarian reform. The starting point should be from below: from the real conditions, demands, and struggles of peasants and rural communities at specific locations, rather than from programmes designed centrally and imposed from above.

For decades, one of the weaknesses of agrarian reform has been its predominantly top-down approach. Policies were designed at the centre, while the people who were supposed to benefit were often treated simply as recipients of government programmes.

That approach must change.

With the LPRA approach, the location, the people, their history of struggle, their land claims, and their agrarian problems become the starting point for designing and implementing agrarian reform. The state should come to the people, listen to them, recognise their rights, and work with them to resolve the structural problems in each location.

So the implementation of the law must be bottom-up, participatory, and rooted in the real agrarian problems of the people.

If this law works, the outcome should also be much bigger than simply fulfilling, restoring, or recognising people's rights to land.

It should change the way the state responds to agrarian conflict.

Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and women in rural areas should no longer face violence, criminalisation, intimidation, or repression simply because they are defending their land and livelihoods.

That is an essential measure of whether this law is truly working.

Of course, we also need to see concrete changes: land for landless peasants and agricultural workers, resolution of priority agrarian conflicts, recognition and protection of Indigenous territories, protection of rural communities, equal land rights for women, and correction of excessive land concentration.

But ultimately, we should not measure the success of this law by how many regulations are issued or how many institutions are created. We should measure it by what changes in people's lives.

If a peasant who has struggled for decades finally has secure land; if an Indigenous community can regain recognition of its territory; if a structural agrarian conflict is actually resolved; if women receive equal recognition of their rights; and if people can defend their land without fear of violence or criminalisation, then we can say the law has begun to become real.

The law must move the state from managing agrarian complaints to resolving agrarian injustice. And LPRA must help move the state from designing agrarian reform from above to implementing it together with the people from below. That is the real test of implementation.

DK: Perhaps what we can share from our experience with movements in other countries is this: do not measure your struggle only by how quickly you achieve a victory. Measure it also by whether you are continuously building the political strength and organisation needed to make change possible.

Twenty-two years is a very long time for us to wait for the law to pass, or even 32 years if we count from when KPA was established. But during those years, we built organisations, developed our arguments, documented agrarian conflicts, educated our members, engaged with Parliament, built alliances, and kept agrarian reform alive in the public imagination.

For us in KPA, there are three forces that need to be built and maintained: consistency in struggle, strength of argument, and mass mobilisation.

Consistency means continuing the struggle even when governments change, political circumstances become difficult, or our demands are rejected. Strength of argument means understanding deeply what we are fighting for, grounding our demands in the real experiences of peasants, research, evidence, and concrete policy proposals. And mass mobilisation means building the collective strength of peasants, because organised people give political weight to their demands.

These three forces have become part of what KPA consistently mandates to all of its leaders, organisers, and members: to remain consistent in the struggle, strengthen the substance and arguments of the movement, and build the collective power of the peasants.

We have also learned that we should not sacrifice the substance of the struggle simply for the sake of getting a law passed. A law is important, but what ultimately matters is whether it can change unequal structures and expand people's rights.

And perhaps most importantly, we have learned to be patient, but never passive.

Governments change. Parliaments change. Political circumstances change. Opportunities that seem impossible today can suddenly open tomorrow. When that moment comes, a movement needs to be organised, united, politically clear, and ready to act.

Our experience in Indonesia has taught us something very simple: a struggle that takes twenty years can move very quickly once a political opening meets a movement that has spent those twenty years preparing for it.

We are still learning from this process ourselves. But if there is one thing we can share, it is that persistence, strong arguments, and the collective power of organised peasants can gradually turn what once seemed impossible into political reality.