A Red Carpet for Tycoons
A group of wealthy business people have received ease in business development. The government has provided them with various facilities, including ease of obtaining licenses and control over large amounts of land. Often, their closeness to regional chief executives is a shortcut to business expansion. In the plantation sector, the cultivation of millions of hectares of land has become a monopoly held by a few business entities, much like the property industry, when a majority of the land is controlled by a few developers.
March 21, 2017
LUKITO Andi was stunned when he learned that thousands of hectares of nature conservation area in South Kalimantan had been turned into oil palm plantations, early last year. Lukito, who heads the South Kalimantan Natural Resource Conservation Center, seeing that something strange was happening with the process of changing land function, acted quickly. He wrote to the directorate-general of natural resources conservation at the environment and f
...