Gerindra Legislator Soroti PKH Task Force and the Future of Agrarian Justice in Indonesia
Member of the DPR Agrarian Conflict Resolution Committee from the Gerindra Faction, Azis Subekti, highlighted the issue of the Forest Area Enforcement Task Force (Satgas PKH) and the future of Indonesian agrarian.
Azis revealed that there is one fact that is rarely spoken honestly in the Indonesian agrarian debate, namely that most of the land conflicts that are exploding today are not merely born from the struggle for living space between citizens, but from the failure of the state to maintain consistency between laws, permits, maps, and its own social justice.
"We have spent too long building a natural resource economy with a fragile administrative foundation. The state issues permits, but is not always able to ensure the limit. Forest areas are designated on maps, but the social reality on the ground is moving much faster than the state's ability to update its administration. Plantation is developing before agrarian certainty is completed. HGU is given, but plasma supervision is weak. Ministry maps are different from each other. At the same time, people live down-to-earth in areas whose legal status changes according to the regulatory regime," said Azis Subekti in his statement, Tuesday, May 19.
"As a result, Indonesia grew as a country rich in resources, but poor in certainty of space management. At that point, the Forest Area Enforcement Task Force (PKH) was born," he continued.
Azis assessed that some people saw the PKH Task Force only as an operation to enforce forest areas. While others see it as a fiscal operation to withdraw state revenues. However, according to him, if read more deeply, the PKH Task Force is actually the state's effort to regain its authority over the national living space that has been moving in a gray area between legality, capital power, and governance weaknesses for decades.
"Therefore, the PKH Task Force cannot be read merely as a forestry agenda. It is a mirror of how a modern state seeks to restore its capacity to control land, natural resources, and the direction of its own economic justice," he said.
The member of Commission II of the DPR explained that in May 2026, the PKH Task Force handed over approximately Rp. 10.27 trillion to the state treasury originating from administrative fines and tax revenue from forest area enforcement. In a relatively short time, the state also claimed to have successfully regained control of approximately 5.88 million hectares of forest areas from the palm oil plantation sector and more than 12 thousand hectares from the mining sector.
"The figure is not just a fiscal or administrative statistic. It shows something much more serious: for years the state has actually lost effective control over some of the territories that are constitutionally under its control. In the geopolitical perspective of resources, this is an important alarm. Not many countries are able to survive strongly when the control of the national living space moves faster than the state's ability to regulate and monitor it," he explained.
Azis explained, many resource-rich countries collapsed socially because the country was too late to read the accumulation of land ownership inequality. "Latin America gave a hard lesson about that. Brazil, Colombia, Peru, to some African countries have experienced a phase when the concentration of land ownership generates prolonged social conflicts. When land is only an instrument for capital accumulation without distribution of justice, the country slowly loses its moral legitimacy. Agrarian inequality turns into social anger, then develops into political and security conflicts across generations," he said.
"In Brazil, the concentration of land gave birth to large social movements such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), a movement of landless farmers who became a symbol of protest against modern agrarian inequality. The country finally realized that national stability could not be built on a too unbalanced land ownership structure. Meanwhile, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan took a different path. After the war, the three countries understood that agrarian reform was not just land distribution, but the foundation of national stability and long-term industrialization. The state limits ownership concentration, strengthens small farmers, gives certainty of rights, opens access to financing, technology, and markets. The result is not only increased food productivity, but the birth of a rural middle class which is the foundation of modern economic growth," continued Azis.
"Here is where the world's greatest lesson emerges: a country that fails to provide agrarian justice will eventually face social instability that is much more expensive than the cost of the reform itself," he added.
According to Azis, Indonesia is actually standing right at the crossroads of history. One of the most complicated roots of the Indonesian agrarian problem is the relationship between HGU, IUP, plasma, forest areas, and surrounding communities. In the normative design, he said, palm oil plantation companies are required to facilitate the development of community gardens around a minimum of 20 percent.
"The basic idea is simple: the expansion of the plantation industry must not marginalize local communities. But in the field, the reality is much more complex. In various regions, there are allegations and findings that plasma obligations are not always fulfilled substantively from the area that is the responsibility of the company concession. Some companies are actually looking for land outside the core area, even overlapping with forest areas or community land, then placing it as plasma," explained the Gerindra Legislator from the Dapil Central Java VI.
Administratively, said Azis, the company appears to fulfill its obligations. But socially and ecologically, the country is stacking a time bomb. The public feels entitled to the plasma given. They have managed the land for years. Some build their lives and economic identities there. But when the state comes to enforce forest areas, the public is the first to face the state.
"In the eyes of the public, the state seems to be against the little people. In fact, in many cases, the little people are actually downstream from the chaos of governance and agrarian manipulation that has been going on for years. This is the most sensitive point of the PKH Task Force. The state must not fail to distinguish between the main actors of large-scale illegal possession and the community that has been dragged by the state's absence in the past. Because if all the issues are read in black and white, the state risks losing its own ethical legitimacy," he said.
"At the same time, the state must not retreat. Because if the state allows the domination of forest areas to continue to move without control, then what collapses is not only the forest, but the republic's capacity to maintain its own economic sovereignty," he added.
Azis emphasized that Article 33 of the 1945 Constitution actually gave a very clear direction. The Constitution does not merely say that the earth, water, and natural wealth are controlled by the state, but the constitution confirms that this control must be used as much as possible for the prosperity of the people.
"This means that state control is not the ultimate goal. It is only an instrument to bring about social justice. Therefore, the measure of the success of the PKH Task Force should not stop at how many million hectares have been successfully taken back or how many trillion rupiah have entered the state treasury. The real question begins after the land is returned to the state. What is the management model? Who benefits? Will the state build a more equitable distribution system? Or will the land just move from one powerful group to another powerful group? Indonesia needs a new paradigm for national agrarian management. Not just law enforcement, but the reconstruction of natural resource governance," he said.
According to Azis, there are several things that must be done related to the reconstruction of the management of natural resources. First, all the results of the re-possession of forest areas must be opened transparently to the public which includes location, history of possession, social conflicts, community status, to the direction of management. "In the modern era, transparency is a condition of legitimacy," he said.
Second, the state needs to conduct a national social audit of all the areas of the crackdown. The state must be able to map out which corporations are violators, which are customary lands, which are problematic plasma, and which are small communities that have been living in a gray area due to the failure of the state administration itself.
Third, agrarian reform must no longer stop as a political slogan. It must be linked to economic productivity, industrialization, modern cooperatives, food security, and rural development. "South Korea succeeded not just because it divided the land, but because the country built an economic ecosystem after the reform was carried out," he said.
Fourth, the management of land resulting from the re-possession by the state or SOEs must be strictly monitored so as not to give birth to a new oligarchy with a different face. Fifth, Indonesia needs to build a national agrarian data system based on spatial technology and artificial intelligence that integrates HGU, IUP, forest areas, customary land, plasma, and real possession in the field.
"Modern states can no longer manage agrarian conflicts with sectoral data that collide with each other," said the politician who is pursuing a UAI Law Doctorate Program.
Sixth, the obligation of plasma must be completely reconstructed. Azis emphasized that plasma should no longer be a legal cosmetic instrument or a shield for opening forest areas, but must really be a mechanism for distributing the welfare of the surrounding community.
"In the end, the PKH Task Force is testing something much bigger than forest area enforcement. It is testing whether Indonesia is capable of becoming a modern country that is truly sovereign over its own living space. Many countries collapse not because of poor resources, but because they fail to manage justice over those resources. And history shows one important thing: when the state loses the ability to maintain agrarian justice, not only land conflicts are born, but the cracks in the people's trust in the state itself," he said.
"Therefore, Indonesia's biggest task today is not merely to take back the land. But to ensure that after the land is returned, justice really comes back with it," concluded Azis Subekti.