A new land law arrives in a system where villagers rarely win

Parliament passed the Law on Agrarian Reform on 22 September. Writing for New Mandala, Annisa Sabrina Hartoto reviews a book that explains why a law like that can change very little. "Rightless Resistance", by Ward Berenschot, Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, Afrizal and Otto Hospes, is built on 150 palm oil land conflicts, with close interviews in fourteen of them across West Sumatra, Riau, West Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan, plus eighteen court files. Its key word is "rightlessness", which the authors define as the absence of effective legal protection of your interest. Rural Indonesians are not without rights on paper; the rights are weakened, worked around, or simply never applied.

The pattern in the cases is slow and familiar. Most conflicts stay open for years. Communities run out of money and time, then give up or accept a small settlement. Going to court seldom helps, and neither does complaining to the RSPO, the palm oil industry's own certification body. The review names four reasons that keep repeating: land tenure rules that are weak to begin with, no working way to settle disputes, companies and local officials standing on the same side, and villagers who lack the funds and legal help to keep going.

Numbers from the Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria, a land rights group, point the same way: between 2021 and 2025 recorded agrarian conflicts rose by about 33 cases a year, roughly 13 per cent more each year. One finding is quietly important for the new law. Villagers usually argue in the language of custom and belonging rather than in the words of the statute, and that is the argument courts are least equipped to hear.

Why it matters

If your family farms land next to a plantation, this is the realistic picture of what happens when a company claims it: a long wait, a weak case, and pressure to settle cheap. The new law does not fix any of the four obstacles by itself, so the thing to watch is the dull part, whether the government sets up a dispute process with real power and pays for legal help. For everyone else, unresolved land conflict is also what keeps pushing plantations into forest and peat, which is where the smoke comes from each dry season.