Population Sustainability - Indonesia

Population of Indonesia

237.6 million (2010)

The population is expected to reach 254 million by 2020 and 288 million by 2050.

Annual population

growth rate = 1.9%

58% of the population lives on the

island of Java – the

world’s most densely

populated island (940 people per

square kilometre)

Java represents approximately 7% of

Indonesia’s total land area

Transmigration is not a new policy. It was originally initiated under Dutch colonial rule during the early 20th century and taken over by the Indonesian Government after independence in 1945.

Transmigration

Transmigration had three main goals: a. to move millions of Indonesians from the densely populated inner islands (Java, Bali, Madura) to the outer, less densely populated islands to achieve a more balanced demographic development; b. to reduce poverty by providing land and new opportunities to generate income for poor landless settlers; c. to exploit more effectively the "potential" of the "outer islands".

Between 1949 and 1974, the Indonesian government resettled 674,000 people through transmigration. With massive financial support from the World Bank and other international donors, another 3.5 million people were resettled to transmigration sites on the “outer islands” by 1990. By the early 1990s the annual volume of trans-migrants had started to decrease because of the decline of international financial assistance.

The development target for (1994-99) was to relocate 600,000 families.

Before the economic crisis hit Indonesia in mid-1997, the government envisaged the resettlement of 316,000 families, as part of the highly controversial Swamp Rice Mega Project in Central Kalimantan, over a period of six years. The project, however, collapsed in the same year and less than 27,000 families were resettled in 1997-1998. The original target for the following year was to resettle 86,000 families mostly to Eastern Indonesia, but an economic crisis, political unrest and social conflict combined to prevent this number from being relocated.

15.5 million in Sumatra

2.6 million in

Kalimantan 1.2 million in Papua

Based on 2010 census figures the total number of Javan trans-migrants and their descendents living in the “outer islands of

Indonesia is nearly 20 million.