businesses and agencies may be losing or going out of business, causing a flood of
unemployment, poverty, and social frictions. Smaller accommodations are not entirely
innocent: out of the island’s 90,000 rooms, some 40,000 are unregistered.
How long will Bali’s development last? As Bali’s sons and daughters continuously build
attractive housing on top of millennial-old rice paddies for long and short-term tourists
seeking fun, sun, and serenity, with dreams of gaining some lineal rest from the slog, toil,
and volatility of farming life, business and the arts stalk each other. And the government
gets its share.
A recent edition of the Bali Daily discusses the government’s plan to preserve subak,
Bali’s aesthetically awesome and sustainably brilliant irrigation system, as UNESCO has
recognized it as a world heritage site last June. The government’s plan is at best
questionable and pivots on tax subsidization for rice farmers instead of the regulations
that are vitally needed from municipal resolutions. As it goes, the rice paddies adjacent
to lucrative tourist-responsive land are tariffed by their appraised values. Then,
generated taxes pay-off the government-dictated charges and go right back in
authoritative coffers. How the money will be spent ought to be transparent. Natural and
sustainable economic independence looks like this: the more taxes generated from the
endemic tourism that threatens subak and other island treasures, the more monetary
power ought to protect those treasures. Otherwise Bali’s self-sufficiency will further
diminish in concurrent step with the loss of farming land.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest population, has seen a biblical flood of corporate
money stream in this past year. By 2015, the country’s high earners bloc