A different form of environmental destruction is taking place on Java, the island where most Indonesians live and from where most transmigrants originate. There, overcrowding- is wreaking environmental havoc. Among the world’s most fertile agricultural areas, it is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that even a broomstick planted in Java’s rich, volcanic soil will flourish. But overcrowding has pushed the land capacity of Java beyond its outer limits. The size of the average farm is now less than one hectare (2.47 acres), barely enough to provide subsistence living. Some two-thirds of Java’s rural population are tilling plots too small to meet subsistence needs.

The problem is not one of inequitable land distribution as it is in countries that require land reform programs. Instead there is an absolute shortage of arable land on Java. This is a situation that forces farmers seeking subsistence to extend cultivation to mountain slopes and forest reserves of the upland watershed.

Environmental disasters ensue when the monsoon rains of tropical Indonesia rush down barren slopes and wash away soil, roads, villages and even people. With trees and bushes no longer collecting water and holding down the soil, erosion spreads and rivers, reservoirs, irrigation canals and ports become clogged with silt. Nearly two and a half million acres ol Java’s uplands have become so degraded that they cannot support even subsistence farming. These degraded areas are expanding at a rate of some 494,000 acres a year.

A successful family planning program that has reduced the annual population growth rate to 1.9 percent is slowing the rate of population increase, and accelerating industrialization is helping to provide jobs for landless farmers, but no economic or social policy can succeed on Java unless it is part of a national development program that includes Indonesia’s less populated islands. If these outer islands are not developed, there is no way Indonesia can continue to feed itself and to provide jobs for the 2.5 million people who join the workforce each year.

It is impossible to exaggerate Java’s population problem. Together with the small and equally overcrowded islands of Bali and Madura adjacent to it on the east and north, Java comprises only seven percent of Indonesia’s land mass, yet contains some 59 percent of Indonesia’s 200 million people.

About the size of New York State or Greece, Java has 118 million people, compared to the 18 million who live in New York or the 9.6 million who live in Greece.

Java’s population density of 2,070 people per square mile is more than five times New York State’s population density of 382.4 people per square mile. New Jersey, the state with the highest population density in the U.S., has 886 people per square mile, less than half that of Java.

According to the latest census figures, if New York State included within its borders all the people who now live in the seven most populated states in America California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and New York the state would have roughly the same population as that of the island of Java.

The extent of Java’s overcrowding is readily apparent in the following table showing the Java/ Bali/ Madura population, area and density, along with other comparable parts of the world.