Why Do Villages Lose Their People? Analysis of Agrarian Structure Change, Rural-Urban Migration, and Political Economy Transformation Driving Depopulation of Indonesian Rural Areas

Abstract

Rural depopulation — the sustained decline of village populations through out-migration — represents one of the most consequential yet underexamined transformations in contemporary Indonesian social geography. While urbanization narratives typically celebrate the movement of rural populations toward cities as a marker of modernization and development, this article argues that the depopulation of Indonesian villages is better understood as a symptom of structural crisis: the disarticulation of agrarian livelihoods, the capture of rural land by capital, and the systematic failure of rural political economy to generate conditions under which village life remains viable and meaningful for younger generations. Drawing on secondary data, existing empirical studies, policy documents, and theoretical frameworks from agrarian political economy and rural sociology, this article analyzes the interacting drivers of rural depopulation in Indonesia — including land tenure insecurity, agricultural commercialization, declining terms of trade for smallholder farmers, the expansion of extractive industries into rural territories, and the pull of urban wage labor markets. The study employs a qualitative-descriptive methodology supplemented by quantitative demographic and land use data. Findings demonstrate that depopulation is not evenly distributed across rural Indonesia but is concentrated in specific agrarian zones defined by plantation dominance, land fragmentation, and limited access to non-farm livelihood diversification. The article concludes that reversing rural depopulation requires structural interventions in agrarian political economy — genuine land reform, investment in rural non-farm economies, and the reconstruction of rural governance — rather than the infrastructure-focused rural development programs that have characterized Indonesian policy in recent decades.

Keywords: rural depopulation, agrarian structure, rural-urban migration, political economy, land reform, smallholder farmers, Indonesia