Rural youth in Indonesia face uncertain future amid land scarcity, urbanization

JAKARTA, Indonesia (MNTV) – The future of rural Indonesia hangs in the balance, as young people struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world. With urbanization and industrialization transforming the countryside, many rural youth are left wondering if they have a future in the villages they call home, according to an article published by The Conversation. 

Every morning, Indah, 18, wakes early to catch the company bus from her coastal village in Maros, South Sulawesi. She travels for over one hour to a shrimp manufacturing warehouse in the urban outskirts of the provincial capital Makassar. Despite living in a rural village, she does not have any land to establish herself in farming.

She works at a factory, just like many other young women in her village, as there are few options left. 

The rural landscape has changed rapidly, driven by expanding urbanisation, mining activities, commodity crops and infrastructure development displacing once-fertile agricultural land.

As a result, fewer rural young people have access to adequate farmland to make a viable living from agriculture alone, and lingering informality in the workplace makes stable off-farm employment difficult to find. Indah’s story is representative of many youth in rural Indonesia who are seeking new pathways to achieve their livelihood hopes and aspirations.

Over the past few decades, Maros has undergone rapid agrarian and economic changes. The creation of Bantimurung-Bulusaraung National Park has limited local communities’ access to candlenut forests. Additionally, the conversion of rice fields into shrimp ponds during the 1990s shrimp boom led to soil degradation and dependency on unstable commodities.

These changes, along with the expansion of mines, railways, factories and housing on productive farmland, have pushed rural youth away from land-based livelihoods.

Today, they are increasingly drawn to retail and manufacturing jobs in cities or consider migrating to other islands.

This situation means that education is seen as a gateway to “modern” jobs outside agriculture.

Finishing senior high school is considered essential to secure a dream job, whether as a civil servant, salaried retail worker or in mechanically oriented jobs. However, educational achievements do not always guarantee the anticipated pathways to a better future.

Local job market conditions do not always deliver for educated youth. As a result, many young people seek creative pathways to employment, entrepreneurship or “escape” to cities, even abroad.

Factory work in local industrial parks, such as Makassar Industrial Estate (KIMA), is an increasingly important livelihood for rural young women lacking access to land or the finances needed to study. 

These women are collected from the village by a company bus at 6am. They work in a shrimp processing factory from 8am until 5pm, sometimes continuing with overtime shifts until 10pm.

While the availability of this work is reasonably steady, workers lack formal contracts.

Many rural youth choose migration to pursue a better future. Sometimes, they keep one foot in either world as they cyclically move between rural village life, fishing, plantation work or urban opportunities.

Young women have found work as domestic helpers in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia while others commute to factories in Makassar’s industrial zone. Meanwhile, young men secure jobs in oil palm plantations, labouring for land conversions, transportation or construction work in other areas of the country or Malaysia. 

One 42-year-old male landowner remarked, “The unemployment rate here is high. If young people don’t migrate, they will stay unemployed in the village.”