2
AGRARIAN REFORM POLICY ISSUES NEVER DIE *
M. Riad El-Ghonemy **
INTRODUCTION : Agrarian reform Linkage with Sustainable Rural Development
In ordinary parlance and policy design, ‘Rural development’ (RD) connotation
is broader and more ambiguous, than land reform (LR)/ agrarian reform (AR).
Therefore, it is viewed differently by government programmers, donor countries,
international assistance agents and development analysts. The difficulty lies in RD
being long-term dynamic process and in having more constituents than LR / AR, but
its aims could be considerably realized in shorter period of time if started after, or
accompanied by, a more equal distribution of land.
Often rural development has meant such “things” as schools, clinics, roads,
electricity, youth clubs, purified drinking water, small industries, provision of credit,
fertilizers, improved seeds either directly or through cooperatives etc. Thus, the
confusion seems to lie in the sense in which the word “development” is used. Though
necessary, these material things, like income, are only means or instruments to realize
the main objectives in life. What matters is what these things and income do to, or
for, rural people’s lives, i.e. increasing their capabilities (literacy, nutrition, lower
infant mortality, longer life expectancy, self-respect, and so forth.(1) Where extensive
land redistribution, rent reduction and provision of complementary production inputs
are completed, household food-security and motivation for active participation in
local community improvement speed up the process of rural development as took
place, for example, in South Korea and Egypt (1952-1965). Beneficiaries of LR can
also influence government programs and policy priorities, through their own
* Keynote speech at the Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development: Taking
Stock, organized by the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo, Egypt,
4 - 7 March 2002.
** Senior Research Associate, International Development Center, Queen Elizabeth House at
the University of Oxford UK, Professor Emeritus, Ein- Shams University, Cairo and Research
Fellow, Economics Department, The American University In Cairo
3
organizations. I have argued, elsewhere, that both LR and RD coalesce in raising
rapidly the standard of living in rural areas, in general, and reduction of under
nutrition or absolute poverty, in particular (El-Ghonemy, 1990: 91-3 and 1993: 26-9
and Chapter 7).
Recently, emphasis has been placed on “sustainable” rural development
without a specification of what is to be sustained.(2) Agrarian reform or LR being an
instrument for the realization of: distributional equity, agricultural production growth,
and access to the financial market, enables new land recipients to have command over
their food, and to benefit from rural development’s basic services, especially primary
education that increase their human capital with a lasting influence in the future.
These chief ends of development can neither be rejected by today’s peasants and
landless workers nor by the next generation, as the Nobel Prize Laurate in economics,
Robert Solow (1991, 13) says “sustainability as a moral obligation is a general
obligation not a specific one” for conserving a capacity to create and produce wellbeing
of the future generation. Another Nobel Prize Laurate in economics, Amartya
Sen (2000, p. 2037) stresses functional relations that “link the general notion of living
standard to the means that provide the basis of such living”. He says, “sustainability
in a very broad sense is a matter of sharing the capacity for well-being between
present people and future people”. He adds “It would be distinctly odd if we were
deeply concerned for the well-being of the future generations while ignoring the
plight of the poor today” (p. 2038). As conventionally interpreted, sustainability
requires that we have also to preserve the productivity of present scarce cultivable
land and water resources to pass on to the next generation the wealth that we have
inherited from past generations. Land tenure insecurity and lack of access to credit
prevent poor peasants from investing in long-term soil conservation. Lastly, in
examining sustainable well-being of poor peasants by way of agrarian reform and
rural development programs, landless workers and other rural poor should not be seen
as merely means of production but as citizens, whose citizenship and rights to
property and basic public services are virtually necessary if well-being is to be
meaningful over lifetime.(3)
These specifications help us to understand the basic policy issues and the
elements that are necessary in the training of young professionals. They are also
useful for multidisciplinary research in land tenure and rural development as well as
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for understanding and interpreting the experience of countries in the implementation
of LR and RD policies.
The rest of this paper is organized in three main sections. The first is a brief
review of the fundamental ideas behind AR and the historical context with emphasis
on the 1950s and 1960s. The second examines the post-1980 declining concern with
distributive land reform in favour of the renewed faith in the market for securing
access to land via improved credit facilities provided by international assistance
agencies. The third major section identifies the lessons learned and examines some
prospects in the light of country experiences over the past century and the trend
towards declining supply of cultivable land and increasing landlessness.
A BRIEF REVIEW OF PAST EXPERIENCE
As a close observer of agrarian reform and rural development issues, looking
backward over the past century, I consider it the peasant century. In particular, the
two decades 1950s and 1960s stand out for being the golden age of governmentadministered
redistributive land reform as lasting support to economic development,
especially at the early stage of post-independence national reconstruction. Although
an objective analysis of the history of agrarian reform is yet to be made, it seems
evident that the reforms were evoked by absolute poverty, gross injustice, inequality
of opportunities and the rest of the evils of rural underdevelopment.
In this empirical review, no preference is implied for one approach over the
other. Rather, the intention is to understand how the varied pre-reform agrarian
conditions explain the policy choice, and how the institutions of property rights in
land and authority power are central to different organizations of agricultural
production and rural development. They are to be understood in the context of each
country’s land tenure problems, history and ideological preference. However, in a
broad sense, pre-reform conditions were characterized by a laissez-faire policy
operating within a market-orientated economy of co-existing high degree of land
concentration in a few hands and rigid social stratification dominated by a high class
of large landowners, on the one hand, and a majority of insecure small farmers and
poor landless wage workers, on the other.
5
Ideas and Rationale behind Agrarian Reform
The twentieth century began with fundamental development ideas on the
political economy of rural reconstruction derived from earlier agrarian events and
class conflicts, and which have, since 1776, influenced the thinking and rationale
behind agrarian reform and rural development policies. Prominent are those ideas of
Adam Smith (1776) on the ‘harmonic functioning’ of the market forces. In his
comprehensive approach, he criticized absentee landlords and their monopoly over
the corn trade and rising land rents that in his own words “left the tenants poor and
beggarly” (p. 783). Nevertheless, he did not favour government intervention, saying
that “I have not great faith in political arithmetic” (p. 50). A century later, John
Stewart Mill, influenced by the Irish peasants’ famine (1845-51) and their
unprecedented land wars between 1879 and 1892, called for government intervention
to restrain the monopoly powers of the landlords. Being a member of the British
Parliament, and the president of the Land Tenure Association, he was behind the
enactment of The Tenants Compensation Act of 1890, within a capitalist democracy.
Contrasting ideas came from Karl Marx. Based on data compiled during his
field studies conducted between 1851 and 1871 in the Irish and British agriculture and
his visits to France, Marx formed his intellectual construction of pure socialism: the
abolition of private property to be replaced by collective ownership and management
by the working class, within a central planning regime. In his assault on private
property, he formed views on exploitation, and viewed the State in capitalist
economies as the instrument of capitalists’ monopoly powers, and the government as
an executive committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
He also viewed a capitalist agrarian society in terms of its polarization into large
commercial farmers not operating their lands and landless proletariat. He made it
necessary to divide society into an exploiting and exploited class, identifying the
landlords and capitalists as exploiters and the wage workers as the exploited.
In addition to these fundamental ideas of the three pioneers, Adam Smith,
John Steward Mill and Karl Marx, other doctrines and principles relevant to our
subject of the conference were originated by David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, John
Locke and Max Weber on the meaning of sovereignty, power, authority and choice,
the divine rights of the sovereign and of property and the divine rights of human
labour, and a distinction between the role of the state and people. They also probed
6
what is meant by values, beliefs, expectations, customs, scarcity, ethics in capitalism
and conflicts in private and public interests in land.
Many of these ideas were accepted in the USA at the time of its independence
from Great Britain and they were reflected in the Constitution and federal power of
the Supreme Court in defining and protecting property rights against monopoly
powers by enacting Anti-Trust laws. They were also reflected in the early agrarian
reforms of USA, including that pursued by the chief author of the “Declaration of
Independence”, Thomas Jefferson in his vision of “family farms are the most precious
part of a state”. Early reforms include also the single tax on land of Henry George and
the conception of family farm championed by President Lincoln’s Homestead Act of
1862, granting any American citizen clear title to a free land area of 160 acres of
public land, on the condition of tilling it for a minimum period of five years.
Between 1862 and 1900, more than 14 million Homesteaders came from abroad. The
institution of family farm represented the American ideals of liberty, citizenship and
enterprising embedded in land property rights.
Types of Reform in Early Twentieth Century
At the start of the twentieth century, the first peasant revolution-based AR
began in Chiapas, Mexico, between 1910 and 1914 under the leadership of Emiliano
Zapata. The peasants’ uprising was evoked by despair, and aggressive invasion of
their ejido lands by powerful agents of sugar and cotton plantations. The Mexican
peasants’ declaration of 1911, called for the restitution of their lost tierra y libertad
(land and liberty). They succeeded in the re-possession of their lands, and in 1917
their rights to communal land (ejido) was made part of the Mexican Constitution
(Article 27). It was President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40) who made AR a viable
policy by distributing nearly 18 million hectares (mostly irrigated land area
amounting to more than five times Egypt’s present agricultural land area (one hectare
= 2.4 acres). This type of reform was followed later in Bolivia in 1951-2.
Radical and complete land reforms, based on peasants’ uprising, were also
introduced in Russia (1905-1917) and China (1930-35) within a Marxist system of
rural economy, in contrast to the Mexican capitalist system.(4) The Russian peasants
supported by the workers union, several intellectuals and some sections of the army
won their demands for equal landholdings after the 1917 Bolshevic revolution when
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Lenin proposed the Land Decree that was issued in 1918 as the Law of the
Socialization of the Land. Marx’s Communist Manifesto was applied: abolition of
private property rights, confiscation of lands belonging to landlords and the Church
for distribution to peasants and landless workers in almost equal size of holdings, the
management of land distribution and use by rural district land committees of the
peasants with their grouping into cooperatives; and the prohibition of hiring labour
and the sale of their land. In the 1930s, aggressive collectivization of cooperative
units was introduced by Joseph Stalin, allowing an individually farmed plot for
household consumption of vegetables and fruits.
The Chinese socialist transformation of agrarian structure started in the 1930s
in the Province of Yunan under the leadership of Mao Ze Dong. After organizing the
peasants into the Red Army, he spread the reform throughout rural China during the
peasants’ long March (1934-35). A series of reforms were instituted during the period
1948-79, changing fundamentally land tenure and the organization of agriculture.
The reform intended to remedy the defects of the market-oriented economy whose
land concentration was high, cash rents exorbitant and sharecropping arrangements
unjust, considering that 70% of total farm land was leased out. There was also
widespread illiteracy (80%), indebtedness (to moneylenders) and consumption of
poppy-opium that damaged the health and economic conditions of the 300 million
land-poor peasants and landless workers.
The major features of this socialist transformation was similar to that of Russia
with the exception of the Chinese emphasis on: (1) the mobilization of the abundant
agricultural labour, converting its productive capacity into capital accumulation for
comprehensive rural development; (2) the establishment of small-scale, labourintensive
industries scattered all over rural areas; and (3) human development through
universal literacy, pragmatic health service, and payment of welfare subsidies to the
poorest. The point to bear in mind is that the process of transformation was carried
out during three decades, 1948-78, through a pragmatic approach relevant to Chinese
traditions and the structure of the rural system.
Complete land reforms were also implemented in the market economies of
South Korea, Taiwan and the industrialized Japan, combined with labour-intensive
farming and rural development programs, based on private property rights. These
8
reforms were quickly implemented under an ideology of capitalist democracy induced
and actively supported by the United States Liberation Forces after the defeat of Japan
in the Second World War. Prior to implementing the redistributive programs between
1945 and 1955, concentration of land ownership was high, absentee landowners and
tenancy were widespread, and landless agricultural workers as percentage of total
farm households was around 30%, on average, in the three countries. A low ceiling
on private land ownership, of about 7 acres, on average, was established above which
land was purchased by government for its resale to tenants tilling the land in units of
2-3 acres, on average. In some areas, affected landowners were even paid subsidies
as an incentive for not disrupting food production, primarily rice, wheat and potatoes.
These three programs were implemented swiftly and peacefully by governments
without waiting for a peasant uprising.
The Golden Age of Agrarian Reform 1950-70
In terms of the number of countries implementing agrarian reform programs
and proportions of peasant beneficiaries and area of land redistributed, I consider the
two decades, the 1950’s and the 1960s, the golden age of the emancipation of poor
peasants. This agrarian transformation occurred at the early stage of national
reconstruction, following independence of most developing countries from long
colonial rules by Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese. These
European powers shaped the entire rural systems of the colonized countries to serve
their own interests: increasing revenue from land taxation, granting land to influential
families of large landowners in exchange for political support, colonizing vast areas
of the best agricultural land to settle their own individual and corporate farmers
(except UK) using native cheap labour, and changing the cropping patterns to suit
their own manufacturing industry.(6)
It is also true that the European colonial powers introduced elements of
agricultural modernization and commercialization as well as land and credit markets.
These elements include irrigation expansion and land transactions (purchase, sale,
leasing and mortgage). Hence the emergence of large estates, absentee land
ownership and the duality in the agrarian structure between modern and traditional
sectors. Consequently, indebtedness and the process of polarization in the distribution
of land and income took root. Invariably, the colonial mechanism was a centralized
bureaucracy in alliance with large landowners, foreign settlers, multi-national
9
corporations, rich city merchants and tribal chiefs against the interests of the poor
majority (subsistence small farmers, nomads and hired workers). The legal
framework was imported from the colonial power home country and imposed upon
the long established social order.
In this historical context, the post-independence agrarian reforms were a
policy choice to remedy the inherited agrarian system that was peculiar to each
country and which significantly influenced the content of rural development strategy
in different countries. It may be useful to illustrate the dynamics of these interacting
elements in Algeria, about which I wrote extensively (El-Ghonemy, 1967, 1968 and
1993). Since the 1830s, French settlers and other French migrants had flowed to
Algeria, reaching one million in the 1950s. The land settlers numbering 23,000
families (5% of total population) owned 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres)
accounting for 37% of total cultivable land. The settlers’ land was most productive
and well situated, with an average area of 1000 acres per settler (colon) compared to
only 20 acres per native landholder. Gross inequality of income distribution was
associated with dualism in farm production: value productivity of a French-held land
(growing vines, citrus, fruits and sugarcane) was nearly ten times that of a native
Algerian; 65% of them were living in poverty. Immediately after independence in
July 1962, the Algerian leadership confiscated all French-owned lands. Later in 1972,
the government established a ceiling of 40 hectares on privately owned land,
abolished the sharecropping system, and cancelled the peasants’ accumulated debts.
The government distributed nearly 37% of total agricultural land (in units of 10 ha.
each) to small tenants and landless workers, representing about half the total
agricultural households who were grouped into government-controlled cooperatives
(known later as the socialist sector).
Internationally, the 1950s witnessed a wave of agrarian reforms: Italy (1950,
1951), Egypt (1952), All India (1953), Bolivia (1952, 1953), Tunisia and Morocco
(1956), Colombia (1957), Iraq, Syria and Pakistan (1958) and Cuba (1959). In the
1960s, many of these reform programs were strengthened and several other countries’
joined the agrarian reform movement. They include Venezuela (1960), Iran (1962),
Chile (1967), Yemen (1968), Peru (1969) and Libya (1970). These reforms were
evoked by different agrarian problems and they differ in initial situations, aims, scope
of implementation and political will, as do results. Two examples from Latin
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America may help to explain these variations; Cuba and Colombia which I studied
first in 1959 and 1960 and later in 1990. To some extent, they illustrate that each
reform process is unique. Since the 16th century, these two countries like others in
Latin America were dominated by large estates (latifundia) granted to influential
people and the Catholic Church by the Spanish Sovereign, who imposed these
institutions and laws upon indigenous populations by the Divine Rights of the Crown.
The Cuban approach championed in 1959 by Fidel Castro was a complete
reform of the rural system: expropriation of private landownership in excess of 67 ha.
for their redistribution - free of charge - to the peasants in units of 30 ha. lowered to
16 ha. (on average) in 1963. Large sugar-cane plantations (mostly owned by
Americans), cattle ranches and unused land were converted into state farms, the total
area of which amounted to 60% of total agricultural land in 1963 and was considered
the focus of socialist ideology. Under the State command, supply of inputs, marketing
of products and processing of raw material were governed by a
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Table 1 Estimated Ratios of Redistributed Area and Land Recipient Households in 22
Developing Countries (excluding settlement schemes) 1915-1990
Countries in
descending order of
beneficiaries’ scale and
years of reform acts
Beneficiary
households as %
of total agric.
households
Redistributed
land as % of total
agricultural land
Size ratio of ceiling to
beneficiaries’ units
China (1949-1956) 90 circ. 80a No ceiling
South Korea (1945, 1950) 75-7 65 3 ha. 1-2 ha. (3:1)
Cuba (1959-1965) 60 60 67 ha./30 ha. (2.2:1)
Ethiopia (1975, 1979) 57 76b 10 ha./3 ha. (3.3:1)
Iraq (1958, 1971) 56 60 Varies according to land
quality
Mexico (1915, 1934, 1940
and 1971)
55 circ. 42 100 ha. irrigated and 300 ha.
rainfed ceiling and 2-5 ha. irrig.
units (28:1)
Tunisia (1956, 1957, 1958,
1964)
49 57c mostly recovered Frenchowned
farms
Iran (1962, 1967, 1989) 45 34d
Peru (1969, 1970) 40 38 Ceiling, irrig. 150 ha. in coast
and 55 in Sierra.
Algeria (1962, 1971) 37 50e circ. 40 ha./15 ha. (3:1)
Yemen, South (1969, 1970) 25 47 8 ha. 2 ha. irrigated (4:1)
Nicaragua (1979, 1984,
1986)
23 28 Ceiling 350 ha. in Pacific Zone
and 4 ha. (87:1)
Sri Lanka (1972, 1973) 23 12 25 ha./3 ha. irrig. (8:1)
El Salvador (1980) 23 22 120 ha. 5 ha. (24:1)
Syria (1958, 1963, 1980) 16 10f rainfed (7:1) irrigated (4:1)
Egypt (1952, 1961) 14 10 40:1 irrigated
Libya (1970-75) 12 13 Recovered ex-Italian farms
Chile (1967-73) 12 13g 80 standardized ha. And
around 5 ha. irrigated (16:1)
Philippines (1972, 1988,
1994)
8 10h 5 ha/1 ha. corn and rice (3:1)
India (all, 1953-1979) 4 3 differs by states
Pakistan (1959, 1972) 3 4 65 ha. 4 ha.
Morocco (1956, 1963, 1973) 2 4 No ceiling, only recovered
French-owned lands
__________________________________________________________________________
Notes:
a. after deducting areas of state farms, and non-crop lands.
b. area of Peasant Associations and including producers’ cooperatives.
c. includes the individualized habous on private Waqf land.
d. includes the area reallocated by the Council of Determination in March 1989, which was occupied
by peasants after the owners fled the country.
e. includes 2.6 million hectares of recovered French-owned farms (auto-gestion socialist sector).
f. the area does not include 911,201 hectares expropriated but not redistributed up to 1990.
g. these estimated percentages of beneficiaries and land rise to 18 and 36 respectively when all
asentados (potential beneficiaries) were included (see Barraclough and Affonso (1972: 16)).
h. after the deferment of the distribution of 0.3 million ha. to the year 2005, the restitution of nearly
80,000 ha. to original owners and the exemptions made in President Ramos Decree RA7881 of 1994.
Sources: China, South Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Mexico, Egypt, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan: El-Ghonemy (1990a:
Chapters 6 and 7 and Table 7.1). Ethiopia: Abate and Kiros (1983: 160-76). Chile: Castillo and Lehman (1983: 249-
68). Nicaragua: Baumeister (1994: 223). Peru: Kay (1983: 206-17). Ethiopia, Chile and Peru are in Ghose (ed.)
(1983). El Salvadore: El-Ghonemy (ed.) (1984: 20-21). Algeria, Tunisia and Libya: El-Ghonemy (1993a). Iran: El-
Ghonemy (1998: 157-9). Yemen, South: calculated from FAO (1984) .
Syria: estimated from FAO 1984 and 1990). Philippines: El-Ghonemy (1990c: 269-72) and "Agrarian Reform
Programme - Salient features and progress made", Department of Agrarian Reform, International Colloquium,
Quezon City (1990: 18) and Sentra (1997: 15-31).
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tight planning system. Consequently, greater equality in rural income distribution
was realized, literacy was almost universal and rural poverty was nearly eliminated.(7)
The Colombian approach, on the other hand, was not in favour of expropriation of
private property and its redistribution to peasants (campesinos). Instead, the choice
was a distribution of public lands, developed and complete of infrastructure in
expensive land settlement schemes. The policy favoured also land taxation based on
the principle that imposing heavy taxes on agricultural land may force large estate
owners to cultivate idle land, and to intensify the use of their lands or to sell to the
many landless families who occupied them illegally. According to Law No. 290 of
1957, the basic tax rate was merely 0.4% of value productivity raised progressively to
2% in 1958, to 4% in 1960 and to 10% in 1962 but remained ineffective under the
influence of landlords on bureaucracy. The unenforced law is not law. Colombia
continues to have the highest degree of land concentration measured at Gini index
(0.78 – 0.86) and half its agricultural population are still poor landless, and in 2001,
the rural poor are estimated at 75% of the total poor and they are poorer than the
urban poor.(8) (The Gini index is a statistical summary of the degree of inequality,
ranging from a minimum of an absolute equality value of Zero to a maximum value of
absolute inequality value of one).
Unambiguous International Support
The two decades of 1950s and 1960s were characterized also by strong
international support expressed clearly by the United Nations General Assembly
resolution of 1950 and its ‘Report on Land reform’ in 1951, identifying land tenure
systems that impede economic development and social progress, urging governments
to carry out redistributive land reform, including the provision of credit, technical
support and cooperative organizations. This support was reinforced by the resolution
of FAO’s Conference of December 1951, giving high priority to the solution of
agrarian structural problems, backed by technical assistance.
During the Truman Administration (1945-1953), the US government assumed
a leading role in world diplomacy for the provision of technical assistance to
developing countries, based on the belief that justice in property rights and land
distribution are a basic tenet of democracy, freedom and liberty. The US State
Department’s Technical Assistance Agency convened the first International
Conference on land tenure at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison on October
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1951, followed by its full support to the United Nations’ World Conference on Land
Reform held in Rome, Italy, in 1966. Perhaps the US clear commitment to land
reform policy issues was established in 1961 during President Kennedy
Administration when he created the Latin American Alliance for Progress Program
centred on land reform, established the Land Tenure Centre at the University of
Wisconsin and created the Agency for International Development (AID) to implement
his ideals of reforming agrarian structure “to help the many poor and not the few
rich”. Sections 102 and 103 of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act directed to land
reform states the purpose, “The establishment of more equitable and more secure land
tenure arrangements is one means to raise the productivity and income of the rural
poor”.
The agrarian reform march towards greater equity and poverty reduction
continued slowly in the 1970s. Many of us have witnessed the initiation of new
reform programs in Yemen (1970), Sri Lanka (1972), Libya (1970-75), Philippines
(1972), Ethiopia (1973), Nicaragua (1979) and El-Salvador (1980). The decade ended
by an important international event, the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and
Rural Development (WCARRD), held in Rome in July 1979, in which I was an active
participant. At that Conference, 150 countries and UN agencies committed
themselves ‘to realizing equitable distribution of land through its redistribution with
speed, and to focus their strategies on eradication of rural poverty” (WCARRD
Report). Table 1 presents a summary of 22 developing countries’ scale of
implementation and ratio of large to distributed land sizes.
In this context of international support, a significant role was played by the
World Bank, both analytically and financially. Developing countries; planners,
policy-makers and analysts were in need of a new analytical system that grew beyond
the boundaries of existing conventional instruments of narrowly specialized
disciplines of social science. In the 1960s and 1970s, new multidisciplinary
development thinking emerged, focusing on the realization of economic growth,
equitable income distribution and poverty alleviation, with a particular attention to
land reform and education as the main assets for poverty reduction. It provides a
basis for: the design of poverty-focused policy, the evaluation of effects and training
young professionals in such fields as rural institutions, agrarian reform and rural
development. From their encounter with rural development problems in less
14
developed economies, analysts in some university centers for development studies
(e.g. Harvard, Cornell, Wisconsin, Mexico, London and Sussex) SIDA and The Dag
Hammarskjold Foundation at Stockholm, DANIDA at Copenhagen and the World
Bank’s policy planning and development research units supported by new ideas from
Nobel Prize Laurates in economics, Arthur Lewis, Jan Tinbergen, Roger Frisch and
Theodore Schultz as well as the development economists Doreen Warriner, Kenneth
Parsons, Hollis Chenery, Gunnar Myrdal and Hans Singer. They produced analytical
principles and policy-oriented studies centered around land tenure and justice related
to a speedy economic development. International agencies’ contributions, relevant to
our subject came from the World Bank’s “Distribution with growth” (1974), and The
Assault on World Poverty (1975), FAOs Review and Analysis of Agrarian reform
since the mid 1960s, (1978), ILO’s World Employment Program and many others by
the Latin American CIDA and the USAID Agrarian Reform and Economic Growth in
Developing Countries (1962) and Spring Review of Land Reform (1970)(9).
THE RELAPSE
In the 1980s a relapse has occurred after the notable advance both in the
agrarian reform experience of developing countries and in the conceptual
underpinnings of policy, linking land redistribution and education with agricultural
growth and poverty reduction in rural areas. The pro-conventional wisdom reemerged
with the triumph of the political conservatives in the USA, UK and
Germany. Land reform, that was once the very foundation for anti-poverty rural
development has become obsolete and unfashionable. It has virtually disappeared in
international debate, only to be replaced by sustained agricultural growth, ambiguous
talk about environmental and poverty concerns which avoid land distribution issues.
In the early 1980s, two rural development analysts, Lehman and Ruttan pronounced
the end of land reform for several decades to come. The emphasis has shifted to
tackling such macro-economic problems as foreign debt, balance of payment deficit
and inflation. Could these conditions justify the sharp turn in rich countries’ and
World Bank’s policies? They are long-standing problems – and though it is necessary
to solve them – they cannot be solved solely by fiscal and monetary medicine.
Defective agrarian structures are also an integral part of macro-structural problems
that should be adjusted. Alarmingly the social scientists working in governments of
rich industrialized countries, the World Bank and FAO who claim to be professionally
neutral, have articulated whatever ideology their employers possess.
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The Shift towards Market-assisted Reforms
These distortions and ideological bias-based shift are reflected in the 1980s
and 1990s policy recommendations of the USAID, the World Bank, the IMF and most
of the donor countries. Take for example, the USAID stance on land reform.
Compare its 1961 directives of the Foreign Assistance Act of the Kennedy
Administration summarized above with those of the Reagan Administration in 1986
and you will require no other arguments to convince you how political ideology shift
is unfavourable to redistributive land reforms. The 1986 USAID policy directives
say “No support to government intervention in private land redistribution, but only for
public land distribution in settlement schemes, cadastral surveys, and land
registration”. The shift in the donors and the World Bank policies has been towards
the reliance on the formal credit market for the transaction of land property, freely
negotiated between willing sellers and buyers in the open market. The same principle
applies to the provision of production inputs by the private sector only and the sale of
farm products to traders at prices determined by the open market mechanism. Thus
and through their voting power and major shares in, and capital stock of the World
Bank, governments of the USA and other European rich states have influenced the
bank’s broad lines of policy towards developing countries. Through their
representatives in the World Bank and other UN agencies, they ensure that programs
are consistent with their interests and ideological preference.
We know that by the 1980’s, most developing countries were heavily indebted
to rich industrial countries who refused to give them new loans unless they signed
agreements with the World Bank and the IMF for economic reforms and debt
recovery linked with market liberalization. The strict and harsh conditionalities
require that adjusting countries should not regulate the working of the market. In this
respect FAO, which was given in 1951 and 1979 the leading role in land reform and
rural development, states with authority and without empirical evidence “The market
is the most effective land distribution mechanism and vehicle for the reduction of
unequal distribution (FAO, 1995, Conference Publication on WCARRD). Thus the
UN agencies, particularly the IMF, the World Bank and FAO have become key policy
makers in these developing countries, contradicting the aims of their establishment in
1944 and 1945.(10) With respect to international shift towards the market dominance,
we find such social scientists as Bauer (1982) and Hayek (1978) saying that the
individual’s wealth or income level is determined not by government intervention but
16
only by the market mechanism, and that the usage of the terms ‘inequality’ and
‘exploitation’ is immoral and belongs to the category of nonsense, because the person
gets what he or she deserves from interacting with the market.
I appreciate the market mechanism if the economy is competitive, free of
monopoly power and institutional barriers to access to land and credit and free of
imperfect information. Likewise, I do not underrate the importance of economic
adjustment programs, but they should not be pursued principally for debt recovery
and export growth. My concern is with the protection of the poor peasants and the
future prospects of the increasing numbers of landless workers whose access to land
could not effectively be satisfied by the land market mechanism which virtually does
not exist in many poor countries. I also do not dispute the importance of a dynamic
private sector, but believe that the state has a role in rapidly reducing inequalities, and
in the protection of poor peasants from defective market mechanism and corrupt
bureaucracy. My concern has been strengthened by the findings of an analysis of
recent, reliable data showing increased inequality in land distribution has slowed
down economic growth in countries that have adopted the World Bank and the IMF’s
induced economic reforms (Alsina and Rodrick , 1994 and 1999).
My judgement on the market approach to reduce inequality and abject poverty
is based on both the economic principles related to access to land examined in the
next section and the realities of the rural economies of many developing countries
which I learnt during my preparation of progress reports for FAO and IFAD in 1991
and my study on a few countries’ experience with the World Bank’s market-assisted
land reform, prepared in 1999 for UNRISD.(11) These countries are Brazil,
Colombia, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. Since then the approach was
adopted by Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Uganda and three Central American
Countries. The approach has also promoted the privatization of traditional communal
lands in Africa. While countries experiences with this approach are examined later in
the conference, we address a few questions: Whether or not this market-assisted
voluntary land transfers would be able to satisfy the expectations of providing the
millions of poor peasants and hired agricultural workers with rapid, secure access to
land? Can this approach be sustained without reliance on international lending,
considering these countries’ present heavy foreign debts? Can it be an alternative to
17
redistributive land reform, considering the declining supply of aggregate productive
lands and increasing both landlessness and rural poverty incidence?
Dismantling customary land tenure in Africa
What is worrying with respect to the shift towards the market approach is the
growing tendency for the privatization of customary/communal lands in Africa and
some Latin American countries. It is enforced in spite of empirical evidence that
customary tribal lands are compatible with the production of export crops as with
food crops and that they are the source of household food-security and women’s
access to land. The reform is by way of individual titling of private property rights in
land that for centuries has been communally owned by indigenous groups. The
groups devised sets of working rules for land rights in use and occupancy for grazing
and cultivating food crops when rain permitted. As recognized by anthropologists
and geographers, this customary land-tenure system has been the suitable socioecological
system for land use and livestock husbandry in semi-arid agriculture.
Likewise, its contribution to economic growth includes employment of the
pastoralists’ family members within a rational division of labour of women and
children, the production of a considerable part of the countries’ total meat, milk, wool
and hides, and the conservation of natural resources.
The experience of several privatizing African countries suggests: (1) the
vulnerability of individual owners to the loss of their land to urban land speculators as
well as to mortgage and heavy indebtedness; (2) the weakening of women’s
customary rights in land and their traditional command over food; (3) the shift of
resources away from food crops (mostly produced by poor women) towards cashexportable
crops; and (4) the land buyers are usually businessmen, politicians, senior
civil servants, members of the armed forces and larger land owners who know the law
and registration procedures, and have contacts with credit institutions and land
surveyors.
For example, in Malawi, between 1986 and 1991 the area of privatized
customary land doubled while land buyers converted the production of food crops into
burley tobacco. Consequently, former landholders became wage workers and net
buyers of food from the uncertain market. With population growing fast, at 3.2% per
year, food production per person fell rapidly. In contrast, tobacco production
18
increased from 70,000 tonnes in 1986 to 110,000 tonnes in 1991 (FAO Country
Tables). As Orr et al have concluded from their field studies in 1996-9 ‘Rural poverty
in Malawi is correctly identified with the absence of household food security …
Recognizing the potential of the market to provide income for the poor requires a
broader view of household food security among policy-makers in Malawi” (2001, p.
47). Similarly in Uganda, the economic policy reform towards export-led growth has
induced shifting land use from grazing and growing food (cassava and millet) to
commercial ranching managed by urban land buyers who have kinship relations with
influential policymakers. It was reported that in Masaka and Masindi districts, nearly
half the buyers of 108,500 hectares of privatized communal land were members of
parliament, government officials and senior police officers (Nsabagasani, 1997, pp.
33-6 and Table 3). Once fenced, the ranches deprived pastoral households in the
surrounding grazing areas of their use of traditional corridors for the passage of
nomads and their animals to follow the highly unpredictable rainfall. Similar
problems were identified in Sudan in two provinces, Darfur and Kordofan. In these
countries, falling food productivity and the rates of growth in average daily calories
per person associated with market orientation is worrying indeed.
LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE CHALLENGES
From the brief review of country experiences and donors’ priority-shifts over
the past century, several lessons and future challenges have emerged. They revolve
around the central policy issue of the roles of the State and the market in securing
property rights in land and, in turn, in increasing food production and reducing
inequality and poverty in rural areas to enhance social stability and economic
progress. We have learned lessons of success and failure in the pursue of laissez-faire
policy during the first half of the past century, leading to a high degree of land
concentration, indebtedness, increasing abject poverty, land tenure insecurity, and
peasant uprising that evoked government intervention to amend these market failures.
There have also been failures resulting from tight government control of agrarian
institutions and central planning of investment, production and public expenditure .
Hence the urge for economic reforms and privatization linked to market-assisted land
reform.
Is the post-1980 economic reform transitory, or is it a return to pre-World War
II diminished state authority within a laissez-faire land tenure arrangements? In this
19
interpretation of change, how can the state maintain its role in poverty reduction and
in the realization of sustainable rural development, so defined?
The emerging issues from our review are as follows. The first is the focus on
rural poverty and gross inequality reduction through secure access to land, by way of
either government-administered land reform, or by the market mechanism or, as we
suggest, by some arrangements for their complementarity. A possible form of
complementary role of the state is the removal of institutional barriers in the credit
market and in land leasing as well as the provision of sufficient information on
availability of land for sale and technical assistance to new owners who have no or
little experience in farm management and product marketing. Another form is
government help to old agricultural cooperatives to enable them to compete gradually
with the private sector in the supply of inputs and in marketing as was the case before
the introduction of government control of agrarian institutions.
The second emerging issue is challenging indeed. With the increasing
numbers of the rural poor who are mostly landless workers (FAO, 1988, IFAD, 2001
and WORLD BANK 2000/2001), how to absorb them productively in the agrarian
structure and in non-farm activities within rural areas? The lessons learned from
China and South Korea in coping with this problem of labour absorption during the
period 1950-80 are useful, but probably their massive redistribution of land cannot be
repeated. Two elements are worth clarification: one is that secure access to
productive land is a safeguard against undernutrition and absolute poverty and
eventually it raises gross national product. It is also instrumental in the provision of
rural infrastructure, and basic social services that are required to raise the capabilities
of the rural poor, especially primary health care and education which constitute the
foundations of sustainable rural development. The other is the diminishing aggregate
supply of cropland, relative to the growing numbers of landless poor and small
farmers (mini landholders) documented by the results of recent agricultural censuses.
Because of its importance, we begin with a brief examination of this last point.
The data of cultivable land (actual and potential) and agricultural workforce during
the period 1970-96 are given in Table 2 for 13 countries, including many of those
studied earlier. Hectare/working person ratio is used as a proxy for the supply of and
the demand for land. The data show a general downward trend in the ratio of actually
20
used cropland to agricultural workforce, notably between 1980 and 1996. One
possible explanation of this decline is the slow growth or stagnation in cropland
expansion in many countries while the agricultural workforce is growing. Landless
agricultural workers who constitute most of the rural poor in developing countries
have increased (FAO: 1988 and IFAD: 2001: Tables 2.1 and 2.2). Another possible
explanation is a combination of falling aid to agriculture by donors and the recent
IMF-induced fiscal reforms that have required heavy budgetary cuts in government
expenditure, including that for land-augmenting and labour-using irrigation. In my
examination of FAO data on irrigation expansion, I found that of the total 87
developing countries for which data are available, 63% manifested an alarming
decline.
Table 2 shows also that in such poor African countries as Malawi, Sudan and
Uganda whose financial capacity is very limited for increasing land supply have very
large uncropped areas between 58% and 82% potential land suitable for crop
production but are currently unused (column 2). These areas could be developed using
available funds for market-based LR instead of dismantling customary lands.
Moreover, employment opportunities for the growing numbers of agricultural
labourers have narrowed, primarily owing to rising unemployment in urban areas and
the replacement of unskilled rural workers by more skilled and educated job seekers
who compete for low earning jobs, and to the widespread use of labour-displacing
technology (i.e. mechanization in agriculture). The importation of machinery has
been facilitated by trade liberalization. Thus the hopes for landless workers are in
rural areas and in keeping them out of cities. Empirical evidence also shows that
there is a low probability of land-property transfer to landless workers through
inheritance arrangements within the poor agrarian class because these families have
very limited landed assets, if any at all. Hence, the challenge of providing them with
secure access to cultivable land and non-farm jobs within rural areas.
The renewed concern with poverty alleviation by way of a greater access to
land rests on two relationships that have been carefully examined with rigorous
statistical analysis over the last three decades. One is that productivity of land and
labour declines with increasing farm size; and the other is that greater inequality in
land distribution (i.e. high land concentration) has a positive relation to poverty levels
and negative association with efficiency of resource use (i.e. the utilization of labour
21
per unit of land and per unit of output). The efficiency, so defined, tend to be higher
in small size holdings than large estates. Hence the challenged assumption or view
held by anti-land reform economists, politicians, multinational corporations and other
powerful groups with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They claim that
large farms are necessary for higher growth and dynamic agricultural development(16).
The third emerging policy issue is the pace of agrarian change. The
superiority of RLR over market-assisted land reform is the rapid reduction of poverty
and gross inequality via the direct assault on polarization of land distribution into
large farms and increasing landlessness. For example, available information suggests
a very slow progress in the implementation of the South African market approach to
agrarian reform, despite the availability of funds for the provision of grants and loans
to eligible willing buyers (only 7% of all targeted beneficiaries purchased land in a
pilot area – not the whole rural sector – during a period of four years). Compare this
with the redistribution of nearly 65% and 57% in South Korea and Tunisia,
respectively, within a period of five years, and like South Africa, both countries had
(and still have) capitalist economies and were under long colonial rule by the
Japanese and the French, respectively. Consequently nearly 50% of total agricultural
households in both countries became new landowners (see Table 1). Despite fast
population growth in South Korea, the number of the rural poor dropped significantly
from 9 million to 1.5 million (El-Ghonemy,1990). Similar temporal change associated
with varying initial conditions and different scope of agrarian reform has occurred in
China, Iraq, Cuba, and Egypt which raises the question: How necessary is
redistributive agrarian reform for rural development?
This brings us to the fourth emerging policy issue. Like land settlement and
consolidation of fragmented holdings schemes, market-assisted land reform tends to
leave poverty incidence and the distribution of land virtually unchanged at the entire
rural sector’s level. In such a situation, the battle against the twin problems of
landlessness and poverty is far from over. In a dynamic sense, land reform, as an
agrarian structural change is essential for securing household’s food needs, dignity
and family labour employment that are principal determinants of poverty reduction
which is a structural phenomenon. These relationships must, therefore, be studied in
connection with agricultural development strategy for intensive land and labour use as
22
well as other non-land sources of income and employment within rural areas, and
remittance receipts from migrants.
In my study of the relationship between poverty and access to land (the degree
of the concentration of landownership), I found from the results of a statistical
analysis of data from 20 developing countries including Egypt that land concentration
explains 69% of the variation in poverty levels and that 31% is due to other sources
23
Table 2 Changes in Arable Land and Pressure of Agricultural Workforce on Land in 13 Countries 1970-96 and Projection Rates for 2010
Countries Arable land Agricultural workforce Ratio of actually used land area
in alphabetical Actually used arable land Area of balance average annual growth % to agricultural workforce
order * annual growth % for future crop production hectare/person
as % of total land with
crop production potential
1970-80 1981-90
(1)
1991-6
(2)
1980-90 1990-2000
(3)
2000-2010 1970 1980
(4)
1996
* Algeria 1.2 0.3 1.2 25 0.9 1.2 0.5 4.9 5.9 3.9
* Brazil 3.7 1.7 3.0 85 -0.3 -0.7 -1.1 2.4 3.5 3.7
* Colombia 0.3 0.4 0.3 88 0.6 -0.2 -0.9 2.1 1.9 1.5
* Egypt 0.6 0.0 4.0 3 0.9 1.2 0.5 0.6 0.5 0.4
* Ethiopia 0.3 0.0 -0.2 57 1.2 1.0 1.2 1.1 1.0 0.7
* Kenya 1.1 0.8 0.0 50 2.7 2.8 2.6 0.5 0.4 0.4
* Malawi 0.8 0.3 0.2 59 1.6 1.4 1.2 0.6 0.6 0.4
* Mauritania -3.9 0.5 0.2 65 1.8 2.0 2.3 0.8 0.6 0.4
* Morocco 2.5 1.6 0.5 50 0.9 0.5 0.1 3.2 3.1 2.2
* Philippines 0.9 0.2 0.1 42 1.5 1.4 1.1 0.9 0.8 0.8
* South Africa 1.0 0.8 0.7 - 0.8 -0.6 -0.9 4.8 8.1 7.1
* Sudan 0.7 0.4 0.1 82 1.3 0.6 0.9 3.2 2.9 1.8
* Uganda 1.5 2.1 0.2 58 2.2 2.3 2.2 1.2 1.1 0.8
Notes: * countries whose experiences have been briefly discussed in the text.
‘Arable or cultivable’ is land cultivated with temporary and permanent crops, and land under temporary fallow: it does not include forest and permanent pasture lands.
‘Potential’ land or ‘balance’ is land of varying quality with potential for growing crops, it comprises land in actual crop production use (rainfed and irrigated) and land that could be
cultivated in future (balance). It is a rough estimate because of little knowledge available on land actually occupied and to be occupied in future by human settlements (housing,
roads, etc).
Sources:
Column (1) calculated from Production Yearbook 1996 and Country Tables 1993, FAO, Rome.
Column (2) based on Agriculture Towards 2010. Table A.5, Conference, November 1993, FAO, Rome.
Column (3) Ibid. Table A.1.
Column (4) calculated from sources in (1). In these sources the agricultural workforce is termed ‘the economically active population in agriculture’.
24
of non-land income. It was also found from the statistical analysis that at an annual
agricultural growth rate of 3%, sustained for about 60 years and without changing the
degree of land concentration, it is expected that poverty would be reduced by only
half its level. The same proportion of poverty reduction could be attained much faster
by a one-third decrease in land concentration i.e. by redistributive land reform (El-
Ghonemy, 1993b, pp.11-13).(17). This estimation fits well Egypt’s agrarian reform
and its poverty data. Within a period of 14 years (1951-65), rural poverty in Egypt
was reduced by almost 50 per cent from 56 to 24, instead of waiting 60 years (till the
year 2010) if Egypt relied solely on agricultural growth and sporadic land settlement
schemes.(18) Factors other than land reform have, in varying degrees, contributed to
poverty reduction. They include remittance receipts by Egyptian migrants to oil-rich
Arab states, rising real wage rates, subsidization of goods consumed by the rural poor,
and slowing rural population growth by voluntary birth control. These variables were
important lessons to be learnt from the design of four different agrarian reform laws in
Italy (1950-2) instead of a single law implemented nationwide in other countries.
Each addressed a region-specific agrarian structural problem: the Sila and Calabria
reform focused on population pressure on land, returned migrants and widespread
poverty in the South, while those for Maremma and the Po Delta reformed land
concentration combined with problems of absentee owners and dependence on hired
workers. Non-land sources of income were common for creating non-farm jobs.
The fifth emerging policy issue is the expansion of the scope of the land
market approach to include the regulation of land-lease market and the protection of
tenants from unlawful eviction. These policy issues should receive greater attention
by the prescribers of the market approach in order to provide the many tenants (who
are unable to purchase land) with tenure security and incentives for investment in soil
conservation. In both cases, research is needed on the improvement of the
beneficiaries’ productivity, capabilities and poverty levels. Research is needed also on
the hitherto neglected progressive land taxation that has been frustrated for political
motives. Levying higher tax rates as size of landownership increases, might induce
large landowners to sell part of their land (and so increase public revenue), which
could be used to activate the land market in favour of poor peasants. The apparent
success of landlords, in alliance with bureaucracies in frustrating this policy is likely
to make peasants lose faith in governments that evade crucial issues in rural
development.
25
Lastly, the literature on agrarian reform indicates distorted policy issues,
owing to a distortion of the root causes of rural underdevelopment and poverty, which
in turn results from a partial understanding and a fragmentation of analytic reasoning
into narrow branches of social science, especially neo-classical economics. Hence,
the adverse consequences of separating the study of economics of resource use
efficiency by farm size from politics, culture, laws and the social organization of the
economy, within an historical context. The need for a comprehensive understanding
in training young professionals, research and objective assessment of agrarian reforms
within rural development policy, places a responsibility on our three hosts; The Social
Research Center of the Cairo American University, and Denmarks’ Aarhus University
and Development Research Center.
A manifestation of deficient understanding of history, customs and the social
organization of the economy is the donors’ support of, and economic justification, for
the rush to privatize customary land tenure in tropical Africa. In this way, the
prescribers are ignoring the fact that it took Great Britain six centuries between the
Norman Conquest in 1066 and the Act of Settlement in 1700, to transform tribal
subsistence society into market-centred economy, and to establish private, individual
property in land without monopoly; a principle that became the foundation of the
Anglo-Saxon political economy. Moreover, the privatization of customary land
shows ignorance of the sustainability of access to land, i.e. inheritable occupancy and
use of customary land for each family tribe member and his or her descendants,
without right of sale, because it belongs also to the many who are still unborn. It
seems that this conception of sustainable tenure/food security and birthright claim to
land, and to its food crops and herding, has been ignored by present reformers. The
consequent food insecurity, indebtedness, loss of women’s rights in land and
emerging landlessness are behind today’s increasing poverty in South-Sahara
Africa.(19)
Another form of deficient understanding is the false assertions in the literature
that redistributive agrarian reform comes about by military action and authoritarian
regimes, and that its origin is incompatible with parliamentary democracy. The cases
of Italy, India, Sri Lanka (1972-5), Chile (Frei, 1967-72) and Philippines (post-1987
Aquino and Ramos reforms) contradict this biased proposition. Importantly, many
agrarian reforms came about by non-governmental initiatory efforts. Out of despair,
26
grinding indebtedness and wretched poverty, poor peasants in Ireland (1879-92),
Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, Bolivia, El-Salvador and Nicaragua have succeeded in
bringing about major land redistributive programs based upon the restitution of lost
land rights. Considering the current declining concern for real agrarian reform –
despite increasing numbers of rural poor, mostly small tenants and landless wage
workers – the hope for the interest activation rests on motivated academic centers,
political parties, trade unions and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).(20)
In fact agrarian reform policy issues remain alive in such countries as Brazil, El-
Salvador, Philippines and South Africa owing to NGOs’ efforts and their solidarity
with committed university academics. The future challenge for tackling the sources
not symptoms of poverty in rural areas is, therefore, great. Our conference is a vivid
example of support by three centers of learning to whom we say thank you.
27
NOTES
1. On the inter-relations between personal or national income and human
capabilities, see Sen (1987 and 1993).
2. The term ‘sustainable development’ owes its widespread usage to the
Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development 1987
“Our Common future” New York: Oxford University Press. Known in
literature as The Brundtland Report, it defined sustainable development as
“development that meets the needs of the present generation without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
It contains two basic concepts: the needs, essentially those of the poor; and
the limitations imposed by technological, physical resources and social
organization on the ability to meet present and future needs.
3. For arguments on human capital with lasting influence in the future, see
Anand and Sen (2000) and on poverty alleviation to protect the
environment from degradation, see World Bank (1992, pp. 30-36).
4. Information on Mexico and China are taken from El-Ghonemy (1990:
Chapter 6) and on Russia from Edward Carr, The Bolshevic Revolution
1917-1923, Vol. 2. (1952), see particularly, Chapter 16, “Agriculture”. It
is meant by complete land reform, secure access to land by the majority of
agricultural households and the redistribution of property and use rights in
most of agricultural land, including the areas retained by the government
and managed as “state farms”.
5. The reader wishing to learn more about the reforms in Japan, South Korea
and Taiwan may read Parsons (1956) and El-Ghonemy (1990, Chapter 6).
The scope of the transformation was extensive, for example in South
Korea, about 75% of agricultural households in 1970 became owneroperators
and with the very low ceiling prescribed for redistribution, about
60% of the total area of cultivated land was redistributed, and the
proportion of landless workers diminished from one-third of total
agricultural households to only 3-4% who were absorbed later in rural
non-farm activities.
6. In my Land, Food and Rural Development (1993), I have traced the effects
of the colonial rule on land tenure and cropping patterns in Algeria, Egypt,
Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Sudan.
7. According to the results of a study conducted by a team of experts from
the UN/ILO, Geneva, (Ghai, Kay and Peek, 1988).
8. Based on the findings during my visit to Colombia in August-September
1959, and El-Ghonemy, 1990 (Chapter Five, Table 5.5). The findings of
my visit are in FAO, Report of the Regional Land Reform Team for Latin
America, Rome, 1961, pp. 22-24. On recent estimates of land
concentration and rural poverty, see IFAD: 2001 Tables 2.2 and 3.1. The
Gini index of inequality ranges from absolute inequality at one to a
hypothetical absolute equality in the distribution of land at zero.
28
9. CIDA refers to the Comite Interamericana del Desarrollo Agricola. It
conducted a series of studies on land tenure systems, agrarian reform and
rural development programs, edited by S. Barraclough (1973) “Agrarian
Structure in Latin America”. Also, the 17th International Conference of
Agricultural Economics held at Banff, Canada, in 1979, focussed on the
challenge of agrarian reform. For an understanding of the new analytical
approach relevant to agrarian reform and rural development, see, for
example, Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor?, Dudley Sears
(1969), Challenges to Development Theory and Development, Hans Singer
(1972) Employment, Income and Equity, A Strategy for Kenya, Uphuff
(ed) The Political Economy of Development (1972), and John Toye (1982)
The Dilemmas of Development.
10. At Britton Woods, USA in 1944, the World Bank and the IMF were
established to set up a World system of financial rules and regulations of
exchange rates. FAO was also established in Quebec, Canada, 1945 to
assist developing countries in their efforts to raise levels of nutrition and
the distribution of food and agriculture products … “through the
promotion of full employment and the increase in production and
purchasing power to tackle poverty, hunger and malnutrition (Resolution,
establishing FAO at Hot Springs, Virginia Conference, June 1943.).
11. The study prepared, in 1990, for IFAD, Rome, is ‘Land Tenure Systems
and Rural Poverty’ as a background document for the preparation of
IFAD’ The State of World Rural Poverty; an enquiry into its Causes and
Consequences, 1992, IT Publication, and that for UNRISD is ‘The
Political Economy of Market-Based Land Reform”, Discussion Paper No.
104, UNRISD is the United Nation Research Institute for Social
Development, Geneva, Switzerland.
12. In addition, some estimates indicate as many as 7-8 million blacks in the
reserve. On the living conditions, see the results of the survey conducted
by the South Africa Land and Agriculture Policy Centre 1995: Tables 1, 2
and p. 81.
13. UNRISD 1997: p. 43. The National Land Committee of South Africa
consists of 10 NGOs.
14. More than 100 international delegates attended the Conference, including
delegates from South Africa, Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh,
Brazil and Bolivia, The delegates represented governments, NGOs and
international farmers associations.
15. See FAO (1991), especially the Nikonov: land reform in the USSR (Mr
Nikonov was the President of the All-Union Academy of agricultural
sciences, Vaskhnil, Moscow). The study took place in June 1991.
16. Empirical evidence on efficiency by size of farm is examined and the
results of studies are summarized in El-Ghonemy (1990: Chapter 4) and
Berry and Cline (1974: Chapters 1 and 4) The weak association between
agricultural GDP growth rates and farm size is confirmed by the World
Bank study (1974: table 2.1), the analysis by Berry and Cline (1979:
29
Tables 3.3 and 3.4) and my analysis of data from a sample of 20
developing countries (El-Ghonemy, 1990: 174-5 and Figure 5.4) in which
I found out that the explanation of variations in output growth rates is very
low, 0.04 indicating that only 4% of variation is explained by the degree of
land concentration (inequality in land distribution).
17. The best-fit equation reported by the study using the double logarithmic
form is:
log P = 6.194 + 1.65 log G – 0.274 log X
(13.4) (6.50) (2.49)
n = 21 R2 = 0.70
where P is rural poverty (head-count ratio for the rural population), G
is the Gini coefficient of land concentration; and X is the real income
per working person in agriculture. The figures in brackets are t
values. Differentiating the equation with respect to time, this study
had:
1 dP 1 dX
____ = - 0.27 ____
P dt x dt
18. Using average annual income of Egyptian pounds 35 per household as a
poverty line established in 1950 for social security purposes, the present
writer estimated that 56.1 per cent of total rural population were living in
absolute poverty. The poor comprised 67 per cent hired agricultural
workers and 24 per cent small tenants of less than 2 acres each (El-
Ghonemy, 1990: 247). The estimate for 1965 was made by Richard
Adams Jr, of IFPRI Washington, D.C. 1985: 705-23, and Table 1.
19. These lessons from Africa were learnt from my discussion with scholars at
the Round Table on Agrarian structure held in Nairobi, Kenya, January
1985 and from field studies conducted in six countries (Benin, Congo,
Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania) in connection with the evaluation
of the work of the African Center on “Integrated Rural Development”
located at Arusha, Tanzania. I was commissioned by FAO and ECA to
undertake this evaluation as a Mission Leader during 1993-4. Later, I was
commissioned by UNRISD to assess market-based land reform in five
countries published in Ghimire (2001).
20. Peasant associations and other NGOs engaged in rural development need
their governments’ acceptance and enforcement of relevant international
instruments: The International Labour Organization of the UN, ILO’s
conventions of 1949 No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of
the right to Organize; and the 1949 convention No. 95 on the Protection of
Wages and the 1979 United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of all
Forms of Discrimination against Women (including rights to land).
30
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Berry, A.R. and Cline, R.W. (1979) Agrarian Structure and Productivity in
Developing Countries. Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press.
Barraclough, S. (1973) Agrarian Structure in Latin America, Lexington Books, Mass.
USA.
Bauer, P. (1982) Equality: The Third World and Economic Delusion, Methuen,
London.
Carr, E.H. (1952) The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, London: Macmillan.
Carter, M. and Mesbah, D. (1993) “Can Land Market Reform Mitigate the
Exclusionary Aspects of Rapid Agrarian Export Growth?” World
Development, Vol. 21, No. 7, pp. 1085-1100.
El-Ghonemy, M.R. (1967) Land Policy in the Near East. Rome: Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO).
_____ (1968) “Land Reform and Economic Development in the Near East”,
Land Economics, Vol. CLIV, Feb.
_____ (1980) Mafhoom al Islah al-Zira’I wa dawroh fi al-Tanmiya al-Rifiya
(Agrarian Reform and its Role in Rural Development) Cairo: Dar al-
Geel Publishing.
_____ (1990) The Political Economy of Rural Poverty: The Case for Land
Reform. London and New York: Routledge.
_____ (1992) “The Egyptian State and the Land Market”, 1810-1986”,
Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 175-190.
_____ (1993a) Land, Food and Rural Development in North Africa, London
and Boulder, Co: Westview Press and IT Publications.
_____ (1993b) Land Reform and Rural Development. Paper No. 6,
International Development Working Papers, University of Oxford,
Queen Elizabeth House.
______ with Tyler, G. and Couvreur, Y. (1993) “Alleviating Rural Poverty
Through Agricultural Growth”, The Journal of Development Studies,
Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 358-364.
_____ (2001) “The Political Economy of Market-Based Land Reform” in
Ghimire, K. (ed) Land Reform and Peasant Livelihoods, London:
ITDG Publishing for the United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development (UNRISD).
Deininger, K. (1999) “Making Negotiated Land Reform Work: Initial Experience of
Colombia, Brazil and South Africa”. World Development, Vol. 27,
No. 4, pp. 65.
31
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (1978) Review and
Analysis of Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in the
Developing Countries since the Mid 1960s. Rome.
_____ (1988) The Impact of Rural Strategies on the Rural Poor. FAO,
Rome.
Ghai, D., Kay, C., and Peek, P. (1988) Labour and Development in Rural Cuba. An
ILO study, London: Macmillan.
Ghimire, K. (2001) Land Reform and Peasant Livelihoods. London: ITDG
Publishing.
Hayek, F. (1978) The Mirage of Social Justice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) 2001 Rural Poverty Report:
The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lehman, D. (1978) “The Death of Land ReformL A Polemic. World Development.,
Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 339-345.
Norbert, G. (2001) “Access to Land Provides Food Security”, D&C Development and
Cooperation. No. 4. August.
Nsabagasani, X. (1997) Land Privatization, Security of Tenure and Agricultural
Production: The Ugandan Experience, Institute of Social Studies, The
Hague.
Orr, A., Mwale, B. and Saiti, B. (2001). “Market Liberalization, Household Food
Security and the Rural Poor in Malawi”, The European Journal of
Development Research, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 47-69.
Parsons, K.H., Penn, R. and Raup, P. (eds) (1956) Land Tenure: Proceedings of the
International Conference on Land Tenure and Related Problems.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Ruttan, V. (1986) “Assistance to Expand Agricultural Production”, World
Development, Vol. 14, No. 1.
Sen, A.K. (1987) The Standard of Living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
_____ (ed.) (1993) The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
_____ and Anand, S. (2000) “Human Development and Economic
Sustainability”, World Development, Vo. 28, No. 12, pp. 2029-2049.
Sentra (1997). Market Oriented CARP in Philippines. A recipe for Failure. Manila.
Smith, Adam (1776) The Wealth of Nations. Random House Inc, 1937 edition.
Solow, R.M. (1991) Sustainability: An Economist’s Perspective. The 18th Seward
Johnson Lecture, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA.
UNRISD (UN Research Institute for Social Development), (1997), ‘Report of the
International Network on Land Market Reform, mimeographed,
(Geneva).
USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 1970 Spring Review of
Land Reform. Washington, D.C.
USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) (1962) Agrarian Reform and
Economic Growth in Developing Countries. Economic Research
Service, Washington, D.C.
World Bank (1974) Distribution with Growth, a joint study with the Institute of
Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
_____ (1975) The Assault on World Poverty. John Hopkins University
Press.
_____ (1992) World Development Report: Development and the
Environment. Oxford University Press.
_____ (2000/2001) World Development Report: Attacking Poverty.
Oxford University Press.
Rabu, 20 Februari 2008
Land and agrarian reform in the 21st century: changing realities, changing arguments?
1
Land and agrarian reform in the 21st century: changing realities, changing arguments?
By: Ben Cousins
Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)
University of the Western Cape
Keynote address
Global Assembly of Members, International Land Coalition
Entebbe, Uganda, 24-27 April 2007
________________________________________________
Mike Davis’s recent book1, Planet of Slums , paints a vivid picture of a rapidly urbanizing global
society where hundreds of thousands of people leave rural areas each week in search of a
promised land of jobs, houses and consumer goods. Most urban immigrants, however, find
themselves living in vast, sprawling slums. Many do not find jobs, and eke out a bare living
within an informal economy, now estimated to comprise around 1billion people globally. Davis
characterizes this informal economy as a ‘sink for surplus labour which can only keep pace with
subsistence by ever more heroic feats of self-exploitation and the further competitive subdivision
of already densely filled survival niches’ (Davis 2004: 27). A very different picture from
Hernando de Soto’s vision of a dynamic informal economy filled with millions of microentrepreneurs,
held back from entry to the miracle -world of capitalism only by the refusal of their
governments to properly register and ‘formalise’ their property rights! And, in my view, a more
accurate, if disturbing, one.
Part of the reason for this mass flight from the countrysides of the Third World is the failure of
most rural development policies of the past few decades, whether these were couched in terms of
‘community development’, ‘modernisation’ of peasant agriculture or structural adjustment. While
rural poverty has remained intractable in many places, contemporary globalization has seen the
emergence of increasingly tightly integrated global agro-food commodity chains under the
control of large agri-business corporations , which oversee the production, processing and
distribution of crop and livestock products in international markets, as well as the supply of inputs
to ‘high tech’ forms of farming. National governments are increasingly eager to attract investment
by these corporations, and often bend over backwards to make land available to them, sometimes
for agricultural production itself – as we see happening in Uganda today.
Some rural producers are managing to secure a niche for themselves in global commodity chains
by meeting exacting export market requirements; they are often located on larger plots of land
and employ non-family labour. At the same time liberalized markets have seen low-priced
imports flooding into domestic markets, creating further problems for many farmers. In this
‘brave new world’ many rural households can no longer rely on agriculture alone, and are being
forced to diversify their livelihood within the local economy, or to seek non-rural sources of
income. As Deborah Bryceson has pointed out, large-scale ‘de-agrarianization’ of rural
economies as a result of structural adjustment policies helps to explain livelihood diversification
and urban drift. Another consequence has been the emergence of new forms of social
differentiation within the ranks of ‘peasants’ and ‘the rural poor’, that build on the inherent
tendency of small-scale rural producers to separate out into antagonistic classes of capital and
labour, but articulate with gender, ethnic, religious and other identities in complex ways
1 Verso, 2006, which is based on his 2004 article in New Left Review.
2
In the light of these changing realities, we need to ask: what convincing rationale s exist for land
reform in the 21st century, and in particular, for land policies and programmes that have poverty
reduction as their key objective? It seems increasingly inadequate to simply re-assert that in many
third world countries rural poverty remains widespread and is strongly associated with inequality
in land holding, or to just take it for granted that poor people have a right to land and resources
for their own sustenance. Simplistic assumptions that secure rights to good quality land, held
either individually or collectively, together with access to credit, inputs and markets and policies
that favour small-scale producers, will be sufficient to ensure adequate livelihoods for the
majority of rural producers, can be questioned, in the light of the realities sketched above.
It is also insufficient to add ‘socio-political imperatives’ for land reform such as defusing the
potential for violent conflict, assisting with post-conflict reconstruction, promoting the rights and
social status of indigenous groups and women, redressing historic injustices, or promoting
environmentally sustainable land use (Borras et al 2007). These undoubtedly reflect the strong
association between land and political dynamics in many contemporary contexts, and growing
awareness of the centrally important question of ecological sustainability – but do these
considerations contribute much to convincing rationales for poverty reducing land reform, in the
harsh world of an integrating global economy under the sway of capital? On the other hand, it is
true that a variety of popular struggles over land continue to be waged in many parts of Africa,
Latin America and Asia, as rural people actively resist being dumped on the rubbish heap of
history, and that issues of identity and unequal power relations are often integral to such
struggles.
In my view the realities of a changing and urbanizing world require us to reconsider the economic
justifications for land reform, and to think through what this means for a pro-poor land agenda in
struggles, advocacy and policies. As before, thinking through the connections between land and
agricultural livelihoods, as well as other forms of income (such as natural resource harvesting and
processing, eco-tourism) will be crucial, if coherent arguments for a broader programme of
agrarian reform are to be mounted. In a recent attempt, Akram-Lodhi and colleagues (2007: 391)
argue that land policies must ‘reform land-based social relationships in a multidimensional
manner’. This must include addressing the ‘economically inefficient’ nature of prevailing
property rights regimes, and ensuring that reforms are ‘productivity-enhancing’ and firmly
embedded within ‘the broader structure and goals of strategies for capital accumulation and
national development, poverty elimination and social transformation’ (ibid).
But these kinds of arguments also run into difficulties these days. Many are sceptical, given the
dynamics of global change. One example is Rigg (2006), who suggests that a large proportion of
the rural population in the South can never become ‘rural entrepreneurs’ because they lack the
basic assets and resources which are required. In his view policy makers should see ‘rural futures
as differentiated and complex … sustainable livelihoods … are increasingly likely to be divorced,
spatially and occupationally, from the land’ (ibid: 196, and see Table 1 below).
Table 1. Rural poverty and rural production (from Rigg 2006)
Question Old answer New answer Broken links
Best way to assist
rural poor?
Redistribute land
Invest in agriculture
Re-skill the poor
(investing in
agriculture is
inequality widening)
Poverty and inequality
have become delinked
from activity
and occupation
How to build
sustainable future in
Support small-holder
farming
Support people’s
efforts to le ave
Association of propoor
policies with
3
rural South? farming, permitting
the amalgamation of
land holdings and
emergence of agrarian
entrepreneurs
small-holder farming
has been broken
Reinvigorated and more persuasive arguments are required in favour of ‘pro-poor’ land reform, if
the skeptics are to be convinced. In the past a variety of economic arguments were articulated, but
remember that most land reform to date has been of the ‘land to the tiller’ kind, involving the
confiscation of land owned by landlords with their social origin in pre-capitalist social structures,
and the ‘Agrarian Question’ was originally framed in terms of the role of land and agriculture in
the transition to industrialised forms of capitalism. In the view of some analysts, the Agrarian
Question of capital, on a ‘world -historical scale’, has now been resolved (Bernstein 2006). Is
there a new agrarian question, perhaps of ‘classes of labour’, arising from the conditions of the
21st century (ibid: 453)? If there is, then this might require the re-framing of the rationales for
land reform.
Older perspectives and approaches may still have some relevance, however. In Table 2 below I
distinguish between six main types of economic rationale for land reform, drawn from three
influential schools of thought, each of the six being also associated with particular political
ideologies or stances. (Not considered in this table are traditio ns that downplay economic
arguments for land reform in favour of other goals such as justice, historical redress or sociopolitical
rights)
What I would like to suggest is that proponents of ‘pro-poor land reform’ such as the ILC and its
affiliates should carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of arguments, in
the light of the specific and often highly variable conditions found in different contexts. Some of
these older perspectives may still be useful, others may not; new arguments may need to be
developed. Given rapid urbanization and the growth of slum dwelling, it will be important to
apply these arguments to peri-urban and urban areas as well as rural, and to examine the new
forms of relationship between these once so distinct but increasingly blurred forms of habitation
and livelihood.
What does the typology in Table 2 suggest might be the key issues to focus on in such an attempt
to reformulate the rationale for pro-poor land reform? One can take something useful from each
of the six traditions listed. For example:
1. From the neo-liberal school one might take on board a concern with productive efficiency and
think about policies that will promote the optimal use of scarce land, labour and capital (but
without necessarily accepting its ideological emphasis on ‘market forces’ as the main driver of
processes of wealth creation).
2. From the neo-populist tradition one might accept that scale of production is an important issue
to address, and that a key focus should be factors (including policies) that influence the efficiency
of a variety of forms and scales of production (but without necessarily accepting its founding
premise of an ‘inverse relationship’ between scale and efficiency).
3. From a livelihoods -oriented ‘developmentalism’ one might take a focus on the multiple
livelihood sources of poor people, to help avoid a narrow and blinkered focus on farming alone,
4
as well as some policy emphases such as ‘territorial’ or area-based development’ planning (but
without necessarily accepting the its profoundly apolitical stance).
4. From a welfarist approach to land reform one might take a key concern with household food
security (but without necessarily accepting that this should be the sole purpose of land reform).
5. From the radical populist tradition one might take on board a central concern with the need to
reconfigure agrarian structure (at both the national and international scale) ie. the distribution of
productive enterprises and associated property rights, and their performance in terms of output
and net income (without necessarily accepting its tendency to emphasize the unitary interests of
‘peasants’ or ‘the rural poor’ and insufficiently acknowledge tensions between emerging class
and gendered interests).
6. From the Marxist tradition one might take a central concern with evaluating the economics of
land reform in terms of a wider concept of social efficiency that includes consideration of
exploitation, as well as a focus on the class and gender relations that underpin the organization of
production and of agrarian structure (without necessarily accepting the idealization of large scale
agriculture in some strands of the tradition, or the economic reductionism of some forms of
Marxism).
While there is something to be taken from each of these schools of thought, eclecticism has its
limits, and choices have to be made when it comes to politics and policies. I locate myself, for
example, within the Marxist tradition, am skeptical that ‘market-assisted’ approaches to land
reform have much to offer, and think that recent attempts to theorize an Agrarian Question of
‘classes of labour’ are cogent and speak to contemporary realities more powerfully than other
approaches. What this might mean in terms of policy advocacy, however, is not yet clear.
Conclusion
Proponents of land reform are often concerned not only with issues of land and agriculture in
relation to issues of national economic growth and development, poverty reduction and food
security, but also in relation to questions of social justice and redressing historical legacies of
dispossession and/or exploitation (the ‘land question’). These remain important. In this address,
however, I have offered the view that the economic bases of ‘pro-poor land reform’ need
reformulating in the rapidly conditions of the contemporary world. Large urban populations need
to be fed and technologically sophisticated forms of farming need to be put at the service of
productive regimes that sustain these populations, while questions of the ecological viability of
current technologies loom ever larger. Issues of the unequal structure of international agricultural
trade regimes need to be considered and made integral to thinking about agrarian reform.
At the same time, capitalism in most parts of the South seems incapable of providing secure
livelihoods for the majority of the population. As Mike Davis puts it (2004: 27),
The labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system,
and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under neo-liberal auspices, that
would re-integrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?
The challenge for proponents of land and agrarian reform is to ‘imagine’, think hard
about, and work for plausible alternative scenarios for sustainable and sustaining rural
and urban economies. There are important lessons from past formulations and
experiences, but in many ways this is unchartered territory.
5
References
Akram-Lodhi, A.H., S.M. Borras Jr and C. Kay (eds), 2007. Land, Poverty and
Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization. Perspectives from developing and transition
countries. Routledge: London and New York.
Borras, S.M. Jr, C. Kay and A.H Akram-Lodhi, 2007. ‘Agrarian reform and rural
development: historical overview and current issues’, in Akram-Lodhi et al.
Bernstein, Henry, 2006. ‘Is there an Agrarian Question in the 21st Century?’, Canadian
Journal of Development Studies, Vol XXVII, No. 4: 449-461.
Davis, Mike, 2004. ‘Planet of Slums’. New Left Review 26: 5-34.
Davis, Mike, 2004. Planet of Slums. Verso: London and New York.
Rigg, Jonathon, 2006. ‘Land, Farming, Livelihoods and Poverty: Rethinking the Links in
the Rural South’, World Development, Vol 34, No. 12: 180-202.
6
Table 2. Arguments for land reform
Neo-classical
economics
Sustainable
livelihoods
Marxism and
radical political
economy
Politics/
ideology
Neo-liberalism Neo-populism Developmentalism Welfarism Radical populism Class struggle
Central
focus
Well-functioning
markets vs market
distortions and
‘imperfections’
Linking equity and
productivity
Development =
poverty reduction
Poverty alleviation Inequality in land
holdings as a
cause of rural
poverty; unequal
power relations
Agrarian question
in transitions to
capitalism; new
agrarian questions
of ‘classes of
labour’
Policies
advocated
Market-led LR:
reduce market
imperfections;
register private
property rights;
provide credit to
promote investment
Market-assisted
LR: reduce policy
biases favouring
large farms or
urban consumers;
promote efficient
markets; secure
property rights;
credit; land taxes
State action to
support
smallholder
production eg land
reform, targeted
subsidies, coordination
of
marketing;
LR as part of
territorial
development.
Enhanced access to
land for small-scale
food production as a
safety net
Radical, pro-poor
agrarian reform,
either state- or
beneficiary-led;
must be
productivity
enhancing, with
complementary
agricultural and
dev. policies
2 views:
collectivization of
efficient large
capitalist farms
(or: improve
conditions of
labour) vs support
for struggles for
land of agrarian
classes of labour
Beneficiaries Efficient farmers at
any scale; (often
economies of scale
apply and larger
farms seen as
socially efficient)
Efficient small
farmers who
maximize returns to
land
The rural poor
with multiple
livelihoods; small
farmers
The rural poor and
unemployed with
limited access to
jobs or alternative
incomes
Peasants (small
family farmers) and
farm workers, the
rural poor
Fragmented
classes of labour:
agric workers,
petty commodity
producers, semiproletarians
Useful
questions
How efficient is
production on
redistributed land?
Returns to land,
labour, capital?
What factors &
conditions influence
the efficiency of
different scales of
production?
What are the
multiple sources
of livelihood for
LR beneficiaries?
What difference
does food production
make to household
welfare of LR
beneficiaries?
How has LR
impacted on
agrarian structure
(sub-regional and
national)?
What dynamics of
class & gender
differentiation
occur within LR?
Land and agrarian reform in the 21st century: changing realities, changing arguments?
By: Ben Cousins
Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)
University of the Western Cape
Keynote address
Global Assembly of Members, International Land Coalition
Entebbe, Uganda, 24-27 April 2007
________________________________________________
Mike Davis’s recent book1, Planet of Slums , paints a vivid picture of a rapidly urbanizing global
society where hundreds of thousands of people leave rural areas each week in search of a
promised land of jobs, houses and consumer goods. Most urban immigrants, however, find
themselves living in vast, sprawling slums. Many do not find jobs, and eke out a bare living
within an informal economy, now estimated to comprise around 1billion people globally. Davis
characterizes this informal economy as a ‘sink for surplus labour which can only keep pace with
subsistence by ever more heroic feats of self-exploitation and the further competitive subdivision
of already densely filled survival niches’ (Davis 2004: 27). A very different picture from
Hernando de Soto’s vision of a dynamic informal economy filled with millions of microentrepreneurs,
held back from entry to the miracle -world of capitalism only by the refusal of their
governments to properly register and ‘formalise’ their property rights! And, in my view, a more
accurate, if disturbing, one.
Part of the reason for this mass flight from the countrysides of the Third World is the failure of
most rural development policies of the past few decades, whether these were couched in terms of
‘community development’, ‘modernisation’ of peasant agriculture or structural adjustment. While
rural poverty has remained intractable in many places, contemporary globalization has seen the
emergence of increasingly tightly integrated global agro-food commodity chains under the
control of large agri-business corporations , which oversee the production, processing and
distribution of crop and livestock products in international markets, as well as the supply of inputs
to ‘high tech’ forms of farming. National governments are increasingly eager to attract investment
by these corporations, and often bend over backwards to make land available to them, sometimes
for agricultural production itself – as we see happening in Uganda today.
Some rural producers are managing to secure a niche for themselves in global commodity chains
by meeting exacting export market requirements; they are often located on larger plots of land
and employ non-family labour. At the same time liberalized markets have seen low-priced
imports flooding into domestic markets, creating further problems for many farmers. In this
‘brave new world’ many rural households can no longer rely on agriculture alone, and are being
forced to diversify their livelihood within the local economy, or to seek non-rural sources of
income. As Deborah Bryceson has pointed out, large-scale ‘de-agrarianization’ of rural
economies as a result of structural adjustment policies helps to explain livelihood diversification
and urban drift. Another consequence has been the emergence of new forms of social
differentiation within the ranks of ‘peasants’ and ‘the rural poor’, that build on the inherent
tendency of small-scale rural producers to separate out into antagonistic classes of capital and
labour, but articulate with gender, ethnic, religious and other identities in complex ways
1 Verso, 2006, which is based on his 2004 article in New Left Review.
2
In the light of these changing realities, we need to ask: what convincing rationale s exist for land
reform in the 21st century, and in particular, for land policies and programmes that have poverty
reduction as their key objective? It seems increasingly inadequate to simply re-assert that in many
third world countries rural poverty remains widespread and is strongly associated with inequality
in land holding, or to just take it for granted that poor people have a right to land and resources
for their own sustenance. Simplistic assumptions that secure rights to good quality land, held
either individually or collectively, together with access to credit, inputs and markets and policies
that favour small-scale producers, will be sufficient to ensure adequate livelihoods for the
majority of rural producers, can be questioned, in the light of the realities sketched above.
It is also insufficient to add ‘socio-political imperatives’ for land reform such as defusing the
potential for violent conflict, assisting with post-conflict reconstruction, promoting the rights and
social status of indigenous groups and women, redressing historic injustices, or promoting
environmentally sustainable land use (Borras et al 2007). These undoubtedly reflect the strong
association between land and political dynamics in many contemporary contexts, and growing
awareness of the centrally important question of ecological sustainability – but do these
considerations contribute much to convincing rationales for poverty reducing land reform, in the
harsh world of an integrating global economy under the sway of capital? On the other hand, it is
true that a variety of popular struggles over land continue to be waged in many parts of Africa,
Latin America and Asia, as rural people actively resist being dumped on the rubbish heap of
history, and that issues of identity and unequal power relations are often integral to such
struggles.
In my view the realities of a changing and urbanizing world require us to reconsider the economic
justifications for land reform, and to think through what this means for a pro-poor land agenda in
struggles, advocacy and policies. As before, thinking through the connections between land and
agricultural livelihoods, as well as other forms of income (such as natural resource harvesting and
processing, eco-tourism) will be crucial, if coherent arguments for a broader programme of
agrarian reform are to be mounted. In a recent attempt, Akram-Lodhi and colleagues (2007: 391)
argue that land policies must ‘reform land-based social relationships in a multidimensional
manner’. This must include addressing the ‘economically inefficient’ nature of prevailing
property rights regimes, and ensuring that reforms are ‘productivity-enhancing’ and firmly
embedded within ‘the broader structure and goals of strategies for capital accumulation and
national development, poverty elimination and social transformation’ (ibid).
But these kinds of arguments also run into difficulties these days. Many are sceptical, given the
dynamics of global change. One example is Rigg (2006), who suggests that a large proportion of
the rural population in the South can never become ‘rural entrepreneurs’ because they lack the
basic assets and resources which are required. In his view policy makers should see ‘rural futures
as differentiated and complex … sustainable livelihoods … are increasingly likely to be divorced,
spatially and occupationally, from the land’ (ibid: 196, and see Table 1 below).
Table 1. Rural poverty and rural production (from Rigg 2006)
Question Old answer New answer Broken links
Best way to assist
rural poor?
Redistribute land
Invest in agriculture
Re-skill the poor
(investing in
agriculture is
inequality widening)
Poverty and inequality
have become delinked
from activity
and occupation
How to build
sustainable future in
Support small-holder
farming
Support people’s
efforts to le ave
Association of propoor
policies with
3
rural South? farming, permitting
the amalgamation of
land holdings and
emergence of agrarian
entrepreneurs
small-holder farming
has been broken
Reinvigorated and more persuasive arguments are required in favour of ‘pro-poor’ land reform, if
the skeptics are to be convinced. In the past a variety of economic arguments were articulated, but
remember that most land reform to date has been of the ‘land to the tiller’ kind, involving the
confiscation of land owned by landlords with their social origin in pre-capitalist social structures,
and the ‘Agrarian Question’ was originally framed in terms of the role of land and agriculture in
the transition to industrialised forms of capitalism. In the view of some analysts, the Agrarian
Question of capital, on a ‘world -historical scale’, has now been resolved (Bernstein 2006). Is
there a new agrarian question, perhaps of ‘classes of labour’, arising from the conditions of the
21st century (ibid: 453)? If there is, then this might require the re-framing of the rationales for
land reform.
Older perspectives and approaches may still have some relevance, however. In Table 2 below I
distinguish between six main types of economic rationale for land reform, drawn from three
influential schools of thought, each of the six being also associated with particular political
ideologies or stances. (Not considered in this table are traditio ns that downplay economic
arguments for land reform in favour of other goals such as justice, historical redress or sociopolitical
rights)
What I would like to suggest is that proponents of ‘pro-poor land reform’ such as the ILC and its
affiliates should carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of arguments, in
the light of the specific and often highly variable conditions found in different contexts. Some of
these older perspectives may still be useful, others may not; new arguments may need to be
developed. Given rapid urbanization and the growth of slum dwelling, it will be important to
apply these arguments to peri-urban and urban areas as well as rural, and to examine the new
forms of relationship between these once so distinct but increasingly blurred forms of habitation
and livelihood.
What does the typology in Table 2 suggest might be the key issues to focus on in such an attempt
to reformulate the rationale for pro-poor land reform? One can take something useful from each
of the six traditions listed. For example:
1. From the neo-liberal school one might take on board a concern with productive efficiency and
think about policies that will promote the optimal use of scarce land, labour and capital (but
without necessarily accepting its ideological emphasis on ‘market forces’ as the main driver of
processes of wealth creation).
2. From the neo-populist tradition one might accept that scale of production is an important issue
to address, and that a key focus should be factors (including policies) that influence the efficiency
of a variety of forms and scales of production (but without necessarily accepting its founding
premise of an ‘inverse relationship’ between scale and efficiency).
3. From a livelihoods -oriented ‘developmentalism’ one might take a focus on the multiple
livelihood sources of poor people, to help avoid a narrow and blinkered focus on farming alone,
4
as well as some policy emphases such as ‘territorial’ or area-based development’ planning (but
without necessarily accepting the its profoundly apolitical stance).
4. From a welfarist approach to land reform one might take a key concern with household food
security (but without necessarily accepting that this should be the sole purpose of land reform).
5. From the radical populist tradition one might take on board a central concern with the need to
reconfigure agrarian structure (at both the national and international scale) ie. the distribution of
productive enterprises and associated property rights, and their performance in terms of output
and net income (without necessarily accepting its tendency to emphasize the unitary interests of
‘peasants’ or ‘the rural poor’ and insufficiently acknowledge tensions between emerging class
and gendered interests).
6. From the Marxist tradition one might take a central concern with evaluating the economics of
land reform in terms of a wider concept of social efficiency that includes consideration of
exploitation, as well as a focus on the class and gender relations that underpin the organization of
production and of agrarian structure (without necessarily accepting the idealization of large scale
agriculture in some strands of the tradition, or the economic reductionism of some forms of
Marxism).
While there is something to be taken from each of these schools of thought, eclecticism has its
limits, and choices have to be made when it comes to politics and policies. I locate myself, for
example, within the Marxist tradition, am skeptical that ‘market-assisted’ approaches to land
reform have much to offer, and think that recent attempts to theorize an Agrarian Question of
‘classes of labour’ are cogent and speak to contemporary realities more powerfully than other
approaches. What this might mean in terms of policy advocacy, however, is not yet clear.
Conclusion
Proponents of land reform are often concerned not only with issues of land and agriculture in
relation to issues of national economic growth and development, poverty reduction and food
security, but also in relation to questions of social justice and redressing historical legacies of
dispossession and/or exploitation (the ‘land question’). These remain important. In this address,
however, I have offered the view that the economic bases of ‘pro-poor land reform’ need
reformulating in the rapidly conditions of the contemporary world. Large urban populations need
to be fed and technologically sophisticated forms of farming need to be put at the service of
productive regimes that sustain these populations, while questions of the ecological viability of
current technologies loom ever larger. Issues of the unequal structure of international agricultural
trade regimes need to be considered and made integral to thinking about agrarian reform.
At the same time, capitalism in most parts of the South seems incapable of providing secure
livelihoods for the majority of the population. As Mike Davis puts it (2004: 27),
The labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system,
and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under neo-liberal auspices, that
would re-integrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?
The challenge for proponents of land and agrarian reform is to ‘imagine’, think hard
about, and work for plausible alternative scenarios for sustainable and sustaining rural
and urban economies. There are important lessons from past formulations and
experiences, but in many ways this is unchartered territory.
5
References
Akram-Lodhi, A.H., S.M. Borras Jr and C. Kay (eds), 2007. Land, Poverty and
Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization. Perspectives from developing and transition
countries. Routledge: London and New York.
Borras, S.M. Jr, C. Kay and A.H Akram-Lodhi, 2007. ‘Agrarian reform and rural
development: historical overview and current issues’, in Akram-Lodhi et al.
Bernstein, Henry, 2006. ‘Is there an Agrarian Question in the 21st Century?’, Canadian
Journal of Development Studies, Vol XXVII, No. 4: 449-461.
Davis, Mike, 2004. ‘Planet of Slums’. New Left Review 26: 5-34.
Davis, Mike, 2004. Planet of Slums. Verso: London and New York.
Rigg, Jonathon, 2006. ‘Land, Farming, Livelihoods and Poverty: Rethinking the Links in
the Rural South’, World Development, Vol 34, No. 12: 180-202.
6
Table 2. Arguments for land reform
Neo-classical
economics
Sustainable
livelihoods
Marxism and
radical political
economy
Politics/
ideology
Neo-liberalism Neo-populism Developmentalism Welfarism Radical populism Class struggle
Central
focus
Well-functioning
markets vs market
distortions and
‘imperfections’
Linking equity and
productivity
Development =
poverty reduction
Poverty alleviation Inequality in land
holdings as a
cause of rural
poverty; unequal
power relations
Agrarian question
in transitions to
capitalism; new
agrarian questions
of ‘classes of
labour’
Policies
advocated
Market-led LR:
reduce market
imperfections;
register private
property rights;
provide credit to
promote investment
Market-assisted
LR: reduce policy
biases favouring
large farms or
urban consumers;
promote efficient
markets; secure
property rights;
credit; land taxes
State action to
support
smallholder
production eg land
reform, targeted
subsidies, coordination
of
marketing;
LR as part of
territorial
development.
Enhanced access to
land for small-scale
food production as a
safety net
Radical, pro-poor
agrarian reform,
either state- or
beneficiary-led;
must be
productivity
enhancing, with
complementary
agricultural and
dev. policies
2 views:
collectivization of
efficient large
capitalist farms
(or: improve
conditions of
labour) vs support
for struggles for
land of agrarian
classes of labour
Beneficiaries Efficient farmers at
any scale; (often
economies of scale
apply and larger
farms seen as
socially efficient)
Efficient small
farmers who
maximize returns to
land
The rural poor
with multiple
livelihoods; small
farmers
The rural poor and
unemployed with
limited access to
jobs or alternative
incomes
Peasants (small
family farmers) and
farm workers, the
rural poor
Fragmented
classes of labour:
agric workers,
petty commodity
producers, semiproletarians
Useful
questions
How efficient is
production on
redistributed land?
Returns to land,
labour, capital?
What factors &
conditions influence
the efficiency of
different scales of
production?
What are the
multiple sources
of livelihood for
LR beneficiaries?
What difference
does food production
make to household
welfare of LR
beneficiaries?
How has LR
impacted on
agrarian structure
(sub-regional and
national)?
What dynamics of
class & gender
differentiation
occur within LR?
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform
in the Twenty-first Century
Michael Courville and Raj Patel
We have a real problem with land tenancy; land distribution—
mucho tierra en pocos manos (much land in few hands)—not
everyone has land and everyone needs some!
—Honduran small-scale farmer
3
Although more people now live in cities than in rural areas, a significant proportion
of the world’s poor still live in the countryside. For them, no less than
for their homeless counterparts in towns and cities, landlessness remains a
pervasive social problem. From the dawn of modern capitalism in sixteenthcentury
Britain (Wood 2000) to contemporary land claims in Zimbabwe
(Moyo 2000; Moyo and Yeros 2005) land has been, and continues to be, at the
center of rural conflict.1
A constant theme in conflicts over land is control, both of the land itself and
of material resources and uses associated with it, such as water, wood, minerals,
grazing and gathering. This control hinges on property rights. The ability
to own and transfer possession of land through private property, in turn,
has invariably been predicated on other forms of economic, social, and cultural
power. At the same time, the development and concentration of private property
rights have typically been mechanisms for entrenching and consolidating
the power of some groups over others. Perhaps the starkest example of the
inequities propagated through the privatization of property is seen through the
lens of gender: while they produce the majority of the world’s food, for example,
women in the Global South2 own only 1 percent of the land. The dominance
of the private property model has allowed landownership to become
increasingly concentrated along existing lines of power in the hands of fewer
and fewer people, usually men. Exceptions to this rule are hard won.
Private property ignores need in favor of the demands of rule and order. As
Wood notes (2000), the instantiation of such property rights has involved nothing
less than the birth of our modern capitalist world. The transformation of
the relationship that farmers, producers, and, indeed, landlords had with the
land, turning it into an entity that can be traded and mediated by the market,
changed the character of rural life forever. The expansion of land markets had
the e¤ect of dislocating the peasantry economically, physically, and socially, first
in England and then, within an astonishingly short period of time, in the rest
of the world.
This pattern would be reproduced in the colonies, and indeed in post-
Independence America, where the independent small farmers who were
supposed to be the backbone of a free republic faced, from the beginning,
the stark choice of agrarian capitalism: at best, intense self-exploitation,
and at worst, dispossession and displacement by larger, more productive
enterprises. (Wood 2000)
The inequality resulting from this dislocation brought radical social change
across the world (Polanyi 1944; Williams 1994, 41–103). Thousands of peasants
and smallholders were pushed o¤ the land toward new cities and towns.
Once there, they became integrated into a new set of social relations that no
longer depended upon a primary relationship to the land (Brown 1988, 28–
31). During the early colonial period in the United States, in a nation that had
little actual peasantry3 and that championed free market liberalism, the swift
and uneven concentration of land was widely thought to foment social unrest.
Led by Thomas Paine, a demand for “agrarian justice” was advanced, calling
for an equal distribution of land or for just compensation to small farmers, to
avoid the ill e¤ects observed during England’s feverish land grab of the eighteenth
century (Paine 1925). This call for justice fell on deaf ears as the United
States moved toward industrial expansion and did not look back.
The increased concentration into fewer hands of agricultural land around the
world continues to this day, with little regard for the overwhelming evidence of
the landlessness4 and inequality it has caused (Herring 2000; Thiesenhusen
1995, 159–62; Umehara and Bautista 2004, 3–18). The extent of this concentration
of control undoubtedly would be more severe were it not for persistent
and ongoing resistance, with new agrarian struggles commanding the attention
of millions worldwide. The struggles of the landless in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America have brought a renewed demand for agrarian and land reform around
the world. This book provides an overview of these struggles, the issues and
policies they confront, and the links that bind them together.
4 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
The Shifting Demands for Agrarian Change
Early nineteenth-century land tenure reforms were often taken up, particularly
in Latin America, by fledgling states as they struggled to break free from their
colonial past. More often than not, the catalyst for land tenure reform and early
agrarian change during this era was the liberation of a new merchant class and
the emancipation of national elites from the vestiges of colonial power and religious
rule. The consideration of the small farmer rarely, if ever, figured into
this burgeoning expansion of colonial relations. The importance of the small
farmer, however, would come to the fore as national development projects of
the late nineteenth century began to confront the obstacle posed by feudal land
relations.
The agrarian question of the late nineteenth century pivoted on the role of
the small-farm sector and the pace of capitalism’s movement into agricultural
production. By the early twentieth century, a now-classic debate emerged in the
Soviet Union, between those who championed the inevitability of large-farm
dominance and efficiency, as argued by Karl Kautsky (1988, reprint), and the
family farm economy as a viable alternative path to development, championed
by Alexander Chayanov (1966). The former positioned the small farmer as
transitory, a shrinking class in the transition to capitalist development in the
countryside. The latter viewed the small producer as a central actor in the economic
activity of the countryside, destined to maintain an integral position
within the rural class structure. Kautsky’s analysis and argument for a more
efficient, modernized agricultural sector helped move the peasantry o¤ the
land and toward industrialized cities. The Kautskian view of agrarian change
shared much of the optimism found in classic theories of industrialization and
capitalist transition at the turn of the twentieth century; it was a vision that captured
the imaginations of most world leaders struggling for independence, and
it shaped the policies of revolutionary nations aiming for rapid, large-scale conversion
of the agricultural sector. The small-farm path to development was,
conversely, often viewed as reactionary, anachronistic, and romantic.
Twentieth-century industrial production biases directed the practice of
most national rural development schemes toward input-intensive, monocultural
production that, crucially, required large contiguous areas of land in order
to be successful. Sowing the seeds of a new “national agriculture” along these
lines, governments turned away from the rural poor, who had their own vision
for agrarian change. The Chayanovian view of a di¤erent rural vision, based
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 5
on family farms and peasant cooperatives, has its echoes today in peasant
movement struggles for agrarian reform (see the conclusion in this volume).
The national reorganization of the countryside in favor of industrial agriculture
was made possible, paradoxically, by struggles for national liberation,
which drew heavily on ideas of land being for the people. From the end of the
Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, e¤orts for independence
from colonialization were su¤used with the rhetoric of democracy, equality,
and rights, while they bore di¤ering visions of land and agrarian reform for
national change. The extent to which this rhetoric matched reality depended
on a complex amalgam of domestic and international circumstances and
choices, with highly variable outcomes in di¤erent countries (as we detail
below). With the end of the Cold War, however, the debate over land redistribution
has narrowed dramatically. Formerly a central point in a program of
postcolonial independence, agrarian and land reform programs are now
framed by considerations of equity and production efficiency arbitrated by the
World Bank, with the full support of international finance institutions and
their network of local elites.
This shift in focus di¤ers dramatically from the original understanding of
agrarian reform as a means to a range of outcomes including dignity, justice,
and sovereignty, and as a platform in a broader process of national enfranchisement
and democracy. Today, it is possible to see a convergence of agrarian
policies in di¤erent countries, shaped by each nation’s domestic political
considerations but tending toward a common set of features: property, scale,
technology, and the market. This is the neoliberalization of agrarian policy—
a process that has its analogues across a range of other domains, from trade
to the role of the state (Magdo¤, Foster, and Buttel 2000).
Neoliberal agrarian reforms diagnose, and prescribe policies for, rural
areas in ways that di¤er significantly from the national liberation projects of
the twentieth century. Through this analytical paradigm shift, the policies to
which the term “land reform” refers have altered beyond recognition from
their mid–twentieth century counterparts. Most centrally, redistributive stateled
agrarian reform is unthinkable within this new paradigm. Instead, policy
discussions now highlight considerations of efficiency, making issues of
equality and distributive justice secondary, if they are considered at all. Many
of the most prominent and recent arguments for and against land reform
since the Cold War have come to pivot on economic questions (de Janvry and
Sadoulet 1989; de Janvry et al. eds. 2001; Kay 2002a; Deininger et al. 2003;
Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz 2002). Along the way, an interest in small farmer
6 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
efficiency has reemerged as a legitimate debate and policy concern. Many World
Bank development economists have come around to the view that the redistribution
of land to small farmers would lead to greater overall productivity and economic
dynamism (Deininger 1999; Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder 1995), a
view long since arrived at by others (see Barret 1993; Berry and Cline 1979;
Cornia 1985; Ellis 1993; Feder 1985; Lappé et al. 1998; Prosterman and Riedinger
1987; Rosset 1999; Sobhan 1993; Tomich, Kilby, and Johnston 1995).
It is a measure of the success of this neoliberal reframing of policy that even
those scholars and policy makers who side with arguments for redistributive
land reform find themselves doing so on terms of economic growth—as
increased Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—and not on terms of justice, food
sovereignty,5 equality, or rural transformation. Nonetheless, it is useful to see,
for example, as Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz (2002) have demonstrated, using
what they term a “heterodox economic framework” (though see Byres 2004a,
b), that without a redistribution of land in the Global South, economic growth
will continue to evade the best e¤orts at top-down development, and the chasm
between poverty and wealth will continue to deepen. Griffin, Khan, and
Ickowitz (2004, 362–63) o¤er a theoretical model that allows for consideration
of the political dimensions of resource distribution—land in this case—
by considering the socially sanctioned dimensions of property law and the
ways in which property rights change over time.
When and how property is defined and regulated reflects the struggle for
power in any given place and is subject to change usually in alignment with
the needs of large property owners and the goals of the state (Kerkvliet and
Selden 1998, 50–53). The case of Guatemala is helpful for illustrating this
process (see chapter 1 in this volume). The definition of public lands, or
economiendas, in colonial Guatemala was sufficient to maintain the colonial
lords’ power and access to land, but it stood in the way of the desires of the new
merchant class upon independence. Land law was reconfigured to facilitate
land seizure from the Church and taxes were brought upon the old latifundistas
who left so much land idle (Scofield 1990, 161–65; Williams 1994, 58–60).
Agrarian reform can be and has always been a political as well as an economic
demand, and it is the political aspect of redistributive reform—who calls for
the reforms and on what terms—that has been so caustic throughout the
twentieth century, and even more so in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
While it has become somewhat less controversial to call for land reform
on economic grounds (as Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz [2002] have done), economically
based arguments for land alone will not be sufficient to change the
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 7
structured inequalities of the rural sector. As the logic of neoliberalism continues
to unfold across the globe, a su¤ocating economism6 continues to choke
o¤ any demands for increased resource equality (Amin 2004).
The rise of neoliberalism has come to be associated with an antiauthoritarianism
that exacerbates the decline of an already weakened state and a concomitant
promise of “democratization.” Many liberal scholars, citizens, and
activists currently celebrate the opportunity they see for marginalized groups
to now mobilize, and for civil society, more generally, to flourish. The declining
ability of the state to regulate and direct a domestic development project
has, to some eyes, created this welcome opportunity for resistance and grassroots
empowerment. Yet, most grassroots movements find themselves struggling
to be e¤ective political forces in an age of free-market politics in which
access to the state is now mediated by direct economic power.
While it is true that the marginalized are increasingly allowed to make
demands and to organize within civil society, the reconfigured neoliberal state
stops them short of bringing their demands to fruition through government.
Through a combination of decentralization and an increased privatization of
public services, the state comes to function as an organizational tool for market
expansion, and less a vehicle for representative democracy or resource distribution.
Thus neoliberal populism creates a force that empowers people to
act without ever providing any actual mechanism to help movements realize
their goals: it has led to an era of both more political voices and increasing state
quiescence (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003; Teichman 1995). This reorganization
of the state thus forces any current demand for agrarian reform firmly within
the parameters of a depoliticized (market-oriented) project. In this way, an
emphasis on land reform alone as a means to boost agricultural productivity
avoids addressing the other dimensions of power and historical inequity that
in the current agenda have marginalized both the rural sector and the rural
poor. Similarly, a populist struggle for land that does not take into consideration
power, social rights, and the historical struggle of small farmers7 and the
landless could quickly become part of the neoliberal project and lead to
increased political exclusiveness.
A Call for Agrarian Reform from Below:
The Small Farmer and the Landless
In many nations rural dwellers still rely on the land to grow their own food and
to provide sustenance for their families (Ghimire 2001b, 17–18). Land in rural
8 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
communities is the central component ensuring the well-being and longevity
of families, much as Chayanov saw it. In this context land is not a commodity,
it is a source of life and society. Yet this foundation of life for the world’s poorest
is systematically denied to them. The exclusion from this life-giving resource
is what drives the call for land and agrarian reform from below. Basic statistics
on landholding and farm size from around the world can help to underscore
this point. In Honduras, for example, the rural population was 64 percent in
2002. A 2003 agricultural census calculated that 2.4 million hectares, or 62 percent
of the nation’s agricultural land, were under the ownership of the largest
farmers (those with 50 or more hectares), yet these farms made up only 10 percent
of the total number of farms (Courville 2005, 62–63). The total landholding
of the smallest farmers (those with less than 5 hectares) accounted for
a little more than 3.5 thousand hectares, or 9 percent of the total farmland in
the nation. It is the smallest farmers, however, who account for over 72 percent
of the total farms in the nation (Courville 2005, 62–63). The most recent data
also show a 28 percent increase in landholding concentration for the largest
farmers since the implementation of neoliberal reforms, while the smallest
farmers faced a 4 percent decline in overall landholding area.8
This is by no means a Latin American phenomenon. Uneven land concentration
has created persistent landlessness in the Philippines. Population
statistics from 2000 show that 48 percent of the Philippine population live in
rural areas and that three-quarters of the rural poor depend on farming and
agriculture for their livelihood (Balisacan 2002; Economist Intelligence Unit
[EIU] 2004, 16). Yet at the same time, official estimates during the preceding
decade report that between 58 and 65 percent of all agricultural workers were
considered to be landless at any given time (Riedinger 1990, 17–18).
Landholding in the Philippines has favored the largest landholders, who are
often linked to positions of political power and prominence, as in the case of
former president (1986–1992) Corazon Aquino. Aquino’s administration
endorsed land reform policy during her presidential tenure, but it e¤ectively
avoided major confiscations that would have dismantled the largest landholdings,
including her own family’s 6,000-hectare estate (de Guzman,
Garrido, and Manahan 2004). The 2002 Philippine agricultural census found
that while the total number of farms since the 1991 census had increased by
4.6 percent, the average landholding of small farmers fell from 2.5 to 2
hectares. The limited data on land tenure makes this change hard to interpret,
but the ine¤ectiveness of past reforms and the questionable actions of past
administrations suggest a continued trend toward the erosion of small-farm
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 9
landholdings. This, in part, has mobilized small farmers across the nation to
call for agrarian reform that is more transparent and that is designed not by
the landed and political elites, but by those who seek land for subsistence
(Borras 2003a; Llanto and Ballesteros 2003, 3–5).
The trend of land concentration and exclusion has also shaped the fate of
small producers and indigenous people in Africa. Take, for instance, the case
of Tanzania, which struggled to escape a colonial legacy of large co¤ee farms
and plantation agriculture established under German and English rule. In the
late 1960s, shortly after independence, the Tanzanian government removed
the Masai people from their ancestral territory in an e¤ort to collectivize agriculture,
dismantle colonial land-tenure patterns, and abolish plantation agriculture
(Hyden 1980). The reform relied on the invocation of a fictive Masai
collectivity, which was supposed to provide the necessary dynamism for
socialized village agriculture. The reform e¤ort failed in large part. A decline
in agricultural production followed. This brought increased private investment
and a voracious land grab from foreign developers that continued to keep the
Masai from their ancestral lands (Williams 1996, 218). Forty years after
Tanzanian independence, food security is still elusive, and the country’s agricultural
export production remains under the control of foreign investors
(Mihayo 2003; Ponte 2004, 622–25; Skarstein 2005, 334). Furthermore, 48
percent of Tanzania has been designated as wildlife preserve, even though as
recently as 2001, 63 percent of the population still relied on agriculture and
fishing for subsistence (Economist Intelligence Unit 2004, 15). The land
squeeze has increased the number of Masai employed in the newly established
safari tourist industry, which continues to funnel the lion’s share of GDP into
foreign pockets (ole Ndaskoi 2003a, 2003b). Many landless Masai struggle to
survive, earning meager wages while trying to maintain some of their traditional
hunting and gathering rights on state lands, to feed themselves and their
families (ole Ndaskoi 2003a).
How such uneven land concentration arises—whether in Honduras, the
Philippines, or Tanzania—is no mystery. Though varied, the agents that
account for these examples of uneven land concentration are invariably acting
within a broad macroeconomic climate that privileges large-scale industry.
Modern production schemes such as logging, dam construction, tourism,
large-scale agricultural export, and cattle ranching are hungry for land, and
their land consumption pushes rural communities to the margins in almost
every case (Williams 1986). Rather than being protected by the state, small
farmers, indigenous communities, and peasants have been forced by govern-
10 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
ments, under the banner of “broad-based rural development,” to work within
the demands of the market. The agricultural modernization championed by
governments and other global elites does not necessarily lead to new opportunities
for rural people, who are, if they were not already, marginal to the
increased GDP of national development (Bryceson 2001; Carter and Barham
1996; Kay 1997). International financing of the agricultural sector builds a very
uneven playing field that is tilted against small producers, and the net economic
gains of world competition invariably involve vast gain for a few and
devastating loss for many.
Though part of a profoundly political project, neoliberal land policy tries to
smother its own politics, couching its interventions as purely “technical” or
expedient (Ferguson 1990). Through this “technicalized” policy, small producers
and the rural poor around the world continue to be squeezed out of
national development schemes. The landless have, however, fought back.
Indeed, despite e¤orts to depoliticize the claims of landless people for agrarian
reform, there is ample evidence that the failure of the neoliberal project is
what has fueled the repoliticization of the very people it has excluded (Patel
2006). They have fought back not by adopting the language of technical
efficiency or expediency, but by means of political struggle, direct action, or
strategic linkages with international support systems or nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).
Demonstrating that neoliberalism will fail in theory is one thing; showing
how it fails in fact is quite another. Listening to the experiences of those who
have endured the onslaught of modern agrarian reform policies, not only do
we see the theoretical deficiencies of the agrarian reform program, we learn
how this program, at best, willfully ignores existing power relations, thus compounding
them and exacerbating the inequalities that result. This is important
because, although the attempt to paper over historical inequalities has been
successful—to the extent that a range of government policies in the Global
South are premised on their irrelevance—the on-the-ground experience of
power persists and, with it, the possibility of other approaches to agrarian politics.
At the time this book goes to press, for example, the South African government
has taken a stern line in opposing any further expansion of its land
program on the grounds that such a move would endanger “investor
confidence.” Yet even within the ruling African National Congress (ANC),
many grassroots party members remain convinced of the necessity for broader
powers of land confiscation and of their wider implementation. Still, the belief
that land reform should happen within a paradigm of “willing buyer–willing
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 11
seller” is pervasive within most development circles. Indeed, South Africa is
one of many “success stories” that the World Bank has attempted to spin in
the Global South, with the explicit aim of furthering its policies. In this book,
we consider these policy experiments and their failings—the Bank’s “success”
stories are demonstrably inefficient, failing on the Bank’s own terms (see chapter
5 in this volume). But the issue of the success or failure of a land reform
policy is even subtler than just World Bank policy failure, and has to do with
the fact that the terms for understanding land reform success and failure have
shifted over the last few decades.
There are currently at least two competing frameworks for establishing “success”
in agrarian reform. The first, rooted in the World Bank, sees efficiency and
e¤ectiveness9 as the defining characteristics of successful land reform. This
framework holds much of the politics, and the allocation of resources having
to do with agriculture, as a constant. Over the past decade, during which land
reform has existed under these parameters, this mode of agrarian reform has
established itself as, at best, a palliative approach, maintaining the status quo
while tinkering on the margins in order to address the most prominent and
acute symptoms of rural dispossession. Before the (as yet incomplete) capture
of policy options by neoliberalism, land reform was, to a greater or lesser extent,
part of a broader series of interventions in agrarian and national reform projects,
encompassing considerations of nationhood, identity, employment, history,
the Cold War, decolonization, and the provision of food. In these circumstances,
metrics of success were far more ambiguous and varied.
A second contemporary framework for posing “the land question” is
o¤ered by La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement,10 whose
framework is inherently plural. It demands a democratic process in which a
range of people not only “participate,” that is, play a central role in setting the
agenda, but also shape and dictate the contours of agrarian policy (Patel 2006).
The terms of reference for this kind of land reform are not written in
Washington, but in the fields—and defining its success or failure is in itself
a democratic project, informed by a history of struggle. Successful land
reform, under this rubric, depends on the political and historical context at the
time reform is implemented, but it invariably involves a mass democratic
engagement and will result in systemic, widespread redistribution, requiring
a deep commitment from the state. In most cases, though not all, the poorest
need the state to protect them, to fund their projects, and to engage in the radical
redistribution that will ensure that the reform involves more than simply
a cosmetic change. Successful land reform will be, in a word, political. The
12 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
emphasis on the political is important to bear in mind, when contrasting it
with the current crop of supposed Bank successes.
Land and Agrarian Reform after World War II
A first step toward understanding the neoliberalization of agrarian reform and
the World Bank model is to look more closely at the historical variance of agrarian
reforms worldwide since World War II. This period (1945–2000) covers
the process of decolonization and a reconfiguration of the international trading
system. This reconfiguration (Friedmann 1982) had the e¤ect, after their
nominal independence, of leaving many nations in the Global South shackled
to their preindependence economic roles as producers of agricultural exports
and natural resources for their former colonizers. The entrenchment of colonial
economic relations, within the emerging nation-states of the thendesignated
“third world,” was a design feature of the postwar settlement
(Hobsbawm 1994). Toward the end of the Second World War, the Allied powers
held a landmark conference at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, at which
the architecture for many of today’s international financial institutions was laid
out. The web of world markets became more binding through these organizations
as lending and credit became new carrots for shaping the development
policies of the emergent nations, and these nations assumed mostly dependent
positions within this nexus.
A major outcome of this conference was the establishment and development
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB).
These international financial institutions were developed by the victors of the
war in an attempt to maintain international economic stability. In many
ways, these institutions have worked to shape the function of land within
developing nations, and they have a longstanding relationship to national
banking systems that have continued to finance large-scale agricultural modernization
and expansion in the Global South (Bello 1994). Indeed, it is possible
to view the considerable resources—political and military, as well as
financial—invested in these institutions’ success as a sign of the threat posed
by agrarian reform to the core nations after World War II. To understand this
situation, it is essential to explore how the meaning of land reform has
changed through the latter half of the twentieth century up to now. A brief look
at a few nations from the Global South will help illustrate the variance in the
conceptualization of land reform.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, four nations had already engaged
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 13
in varying degrees of land reform e¤orts as part of their plans for independence,
national development, and change. As early as 1910 Mexico, China,
Guatemala, and the former Soviet Union all made direct e¤orts to alter the
relationship between land and peasantry. Di¤erent assumptions about the role
of the peasantry in these four nations became the impetus for the redistribution
of land and the reorganization of relationships in the agricultural sector
(Enríquez 2003, 2004; Kerkvliet and Selden 1998; Lewin 1968; Thiesenhusen
1995). These early e¤orts ranged from the peasant revolution–driven land
reforms in China and the rather more anti-peasant transformations of the
Soviet Union, to the reorganization of export agriculture coupled with the rise
of popular struggle in Guatemala11 and the radical agrarian struggle of Mexico.
Each of these nations successfully moved land into the hands of the landless,
but that alone did not correct persistent, uneven distribution of wealth and
power in the countryside.
In the case of Mexico, peasants have fought and struggled for land both
before and after the implementation of larger revolutionary movements for
independence. The hacienda system was weakened through the revolutionary
transitions, and land was redistributed to campesinos, but securing social
equality for campesinos has been an ongoing and increasingly frustrated project
(Henriques and Patel 2003; Thiesenhusen 1995, 29–49). In the Soviet
Union, peasants reluctantly participated in land reform e¤orts, and in most
instances faced violence, murder, and increased rural conflict throughout the
process (Lewin 1968, 107–31). Land tenure in the Soviet Union was mostly
reshaped through e¤orts at collectivization and the establishment of large state
farms, changes driven primarily not by the needs of rural producers, but by
urban demands for cheap food, a Kautskian view of the peasantry, and an inaccurate
analysis of rural society by party elites.12 In China, by contrast, the needs
of rural populations were foremost, and many of the beneficiaries of land
reform participated in the revolutionary transformation of power relations in
rural areas (Hinton 1996).
On the other end of the distributive continuum is the case of Guatemala.
Early colonial relationships to export markets brought about some limited,
but notable, land tenure reforms prior to the twentieth century (Williams
1994, 61 – 69). This early demand for land tenure reform emerged in
response to the conflicting interests of indigenous communities, political
elites, and large-scale domestic co¤ee producers. The latter saw some
benefit in extending the small producers’ tenure—allowing them to grow
food for their own consumption, thusrequiring less income to sustain their
14 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
families—while maintaining reliance on seasonal peasant labor at very low
wages on large coffee haciendas. It wasn’t until the period from 1944 to 1952,
however, that the nation pursued an official program of land and agrarian
reform. With this formal state commitment to agrarian reform came much
social upheaval that, on first glance, would suggest a redistributive success—
a case of increased smallholder beneficiaries and the reorganization of rural
social relations. Yet, despite the upheaval and international attention brought
about by these official e¤orts at reform, the impact of the land redistribution
that occurred during the period was quickly reversed. (see chapter 1 this
volume)
This brief consideration of the four countries that saw significant land
reform before World War II point to the implications of the larger structural
(i.e., political, economic, historical) dimensions of agrarian change. These
cases also helped to stamp in the minds of policy elites elsewhere the very real
possibility of radical land reform implementation through violence, carried out
perhaps by those most oppressed under current regimes. Following the interruption
of World War II, these examples informed the thinking of those on
both sides of the Cold War. Communism, or the Cold War fear of its expansion,
fueled a number of post–World War II land reform e¤orts promoted by the
United States and its allies to deter unwieldy revolutions from below. And
behind these ideologically charged e¤orts remained the questions—summed
up in the refrain with which we began the chapter—of who controls the land,
who is entitled to use it, and for what ends. It would be an exaggeration to say
that land reform shaped the Cold War, but it is useful to see the struggle for
land as part of a broader struggle over the meaning of and limits to property.
While the contours of power and the mechanisms through which land reform
was e¤ected shaped the ultimate success or failure of land reform e¤orts in
every country experiencing such reforms after World War II, the question of
property burned at the heart of agrarian reform.
With the above framework in mind, a team of researchers13 from the Land
Research Action Network (LRAN) compared historical data on formal land
reform e¤orts14 in twenty countries since World War II (see figure 1).15 Though
varied, the impetus for land redistribution in these nations often reflected
significant e¤orts to address economic stagnation, to acquire independence,
to build political solidarity, and/or to “develop” national agricultural export production.
Figure 1 lists the twenty countries chronologically by date of land
reform implementation and by period of comparison.16 From these historical
experiences, the authors identified four distinct categories of land reform
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 15
implementation: Cold War proxy, endogenous social revolution, postwar allied
consolidation, and endogenous political compromise.
Group 1: Cold War Proxies (Cases: El Salvador, Honduras, Philippines, South
Vietnam). Reforms in these countries were pursued in the e¤ort to quell
peasant unrest, stave o¤ larger revolutionary action, and/or comply with the
US and/or Eastern Bloc foreign and economic policies. Formal land reform
polices were a mix of expropriation and redistribution of public lands.
Group 2: Endogenous Social Revolution (Cases: China, Cuba, Mexico, North
Vietnam, former Soviet Union, Kerala state [India]). These reforms emerged
in response to social pressures and revolutionary platforms or national struggles
for independence. In these cases land reform was implemented along
with more comprehensive agrarian reforms aiming to address longstanding
inequalities regarding access to land and to reduce persistent rural poverty.
Here the state played an active role in instituting and carrying out reform
policies. Large amounts of land were expropriated from large landholders
and redistributed to landless beneficiaries.
Group 3: Postwar Allied Consolidation (Cases: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan,
Germany). These land reforms were carried out in concert with industrial
expansion and other economic reforms by the state, with the support of the
major post–World War II political players, and aimed to avoid persistent
inequality in land tenure before engaging in industrial expansion. Land was
expropriated from large landholders and redistributed to landless beneficiaries
by fiat.
Group 4: Endogenous Political Compromise (Cases: Brazil, Guatemala, India,
South Africa, Zimbabwe). These reforms emerged largely in response to a
combination of pressures exerted by large social movements, landless organizing
and government policy making that aimed to meet new demands of
export-oriented agricultural production. Limited amounts of land were
expropriated from large landholders and redistributed to a limited number
of landless beneficiaries.
While these typologies are not hard and fast—many countries fell simultaneously
under the categories of Cold War proxies and post–World War II allied
consolidation e¤orts in the attempt to build bulwarks against communism—
they reveal that among the most sweeping land reforms (i.e., swift, statebacked
reforms, involving a large number of families and leaving little quar-
16 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
ter for existing elites) were those preemptively imposed by capitalists—
notably under the postwar allied consolidation category. A measure of the success
of these land reforms has been the extent to which all the countries that
experienced them have developed strong and robust internationally linked
economies (though only after a prolonged period of growth fueled by domestic
industrial protection) (Hart 2002). A little less robust have been the compromises
forged through endogenous social revolution, and more fissiparous
still have been the settlements agreed through endogenous political compromise,
with the most extreme cases of land injustice residing in those states that
were Cold War battle grounds. Yet the Cold War a¤ected all land reforms,
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 17
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
2000
2004
FIGURE 1 Periods of land reform in select countries, 1945–2004
Reform periods Country
1945–20041 Mexico
1945–19892 Russia**
1945–20043* Guatemala
1945–19704 China
1945–1955 Japan
1945–1990 Germany
1945–1953 Taiwan
1948–1974 South Korea
1949–1993 India
1953–1974 North Vietnam
1959–1965 Cuba
1962–1973 Chile
1962–1992 Honduras
1969–2004* Brazil
1970–1973 South Vietnam
1975–2004* Thailand
1980–2004* Zimbabwe
1980–2004* El Salvador
1988–2004* Philippines
1993–2004* South Africa
*ongoing
**former Soviet Union
1 (1917); 2 (1923); 3 (1944); 4 (1910).
whether directly, through endogenous struggles between capitalism and communism,
or by the perceived threat of communism in “frontline states.”
The end of the Cold War heralded at least the temporary end of the possibility
of radical land reform programs. While it was inconceivable that land
could be redistributed through a willing buyer–willing seller approach at the
beginning of the Cold War, by the Cold War’s end it was inconceivable that it
could be done any other way. By the early 1970s land reform policy making had
already began to shift to a “one-size-fits-all” market-assisted land reform
(MALR) imposed by the IMF, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), and the World Bank. A general shift from the stateled
agrarian reforms of the earlier part of the century to a demand-driven,
MALR process ensued (Borras, chapter 5 in this volume; Kay 2002a). The proponents
of this kind of reform claimed that the state-led reforms failed to distribute
land adequately to the landless and resulted, for the most part, in a distortion
of land markets, and they argued that this prevented efficient producers
from acquiring land and encouraged inefficient farmers to continue farming.
Borras (chapter 5) provides an exemplary treatment of the substance of these
arguments. The issue of whether or not there was any truth to these arguments
was almost irrelevant to their reception. As Kelsey (1995) notes in a
di¤erent context, a great part of the successful adoption of the neoliberal
regime comes through its ability to claim that “there is no alternative.” In
many instances, it certainly feels as if there is none. Under neoliberal agrarian
reform, there has been a concerted e¤ort to disparage people living in rural
areas, de-skill farmers, and demobilize their organizations to remove the possibility
of an alternative. Yet the alternative persists.
The tragedy of neoliberal land policy, as each of the chapters in this book
shows, is that it prevents successful land reform—reform that lifts people out
of poverty, increases levels of resource equality, raises living standards, ensures
the subsistence of the rural dweller, and, in some cases, even increases agricultural
export production (de Janvry and Sadoulet 1989; Herring 2000;
Sobhan 1993). Successful land reform can also result in the improved environmental
protection of land when stewardship is granted to those who depend
directly on the land for their own well-being and survival (Holt-Giménez 2002;
Ghimire 2001b). Land reform programs, however, are necessary but not
sufficient to accomplish these goals. They require integration into a broader
strategy for rural development that also considers the landless and the small
producer as the focus of several coordinated e¤orts (Patel 2003).
The promarket argument fails to acknowledge not only the noncommod-
18 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
ity nature of food production, but also the falsity of the assumption that rising
GDP inevitably leads to decreased poverty for rural dwellers. Conceptualizing
agriculture as a commodity-oriented system of production, the World
Bank’s MALR models and the neoliberal economic models that spawned it
avoid any direct consideration of the relationship between the land and the
majority of the world’s poor.
About the Cases in Part I
The first part of this book consists of four case studies representing nations
from each region in which LRAN has focused its e¤orts. Guatemala,
Zimbabwe, South Africa, and India serve as exemplars of reform e¤orts categorized
as endogenous political compromise in group 4, above. Regardless
of the specifics in each case, all four countries have experienced one or more
historical periods of land reform that fell short of the hopes and demands of
the most resource-poor agents in each nation. These shortcomings are not surprising,
of course, given that compromise was required for the implementation
of any land reform policy at all. As such, compromise is one of the few
attributes common to all these national cases. The African cases share some
regional similarities as well, but even with the regional overlap there is quite
a bit of variance among these countries. Yet, despite the national di¤erences
described by each of the authors of these four studies, all four nations have
strangely found themselves facing similar policy options at the turn of the
twenty-first century.
It is this common point of arrival that leads these four authors to take stock
and raise important research and policy questions with regard to the homogenized
land and agrarian reform policy being imposed upon their nations.
Through brief historical review, demographic comparison, and general policy
analysis, the four cases in this section begin to highlight failures and problems
associated with the received neoliberal model that has unfolded before them.
The remainder of the book will explore in more depth and with greater analysis
the themes, criticisms, and alternatives introduced throughout part I. A
brief overview of each chapter in part I will help to direct the reader toward
some of the more salient challenges now facing these nations, on their path
toward implementing a land reform that will more directly benefit the landless
and resource poor.
The first chapter, by Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka, focuses on the long, contradictory
agrarian reform policies of Guatemala. The Guatemala case high-
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 19
lights the changing role of the state with regard to the land question in general,
and the implementation of agrarian reform policy, in particular. The state
played a crucial role in shaping land policy both before and after the World War
II era, while it has also implemented formal policies of repression—enlisting
military force when necessary—to stop any demands that have threatened the
power of landed elites tied to export production. The history of agrarian
reform in Guatemala is a violent one. Past and present e¤orts at agrarian
change have been accompanied by much hardship and loss throughout the
countryside. The authors delve into the outcomes of earlier attempts at land
reform and find them mostly hollow. A brief review of landholding shows that
the beneficiaries of past e¤orts have largely been those who sought compromise,
via the state, with landless peasants and indigenous peoples: the landed
elite and agribusiness holders. Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka emphasize the
limitations of these earlier gains and briefly explore the ways that peace and
human rights movements in the 1990s began to impact the breadth and depth
of popular political participation. The role of the 1996 peace accords is considered
in this chapter, as is the ongoing impact of a century of agricultural
export on the nation’s land tenure system. Finally, the author highlights the
ways in which political and landed elites—often one and the same—continue
to use the rhetoric of land reform to appease foreign interests, both political
and economic, as new land market conversions have become the emphasis of
state policy.
In chapter 2 Tom Lebert chronicles the Zimbabwe case, one of the most
recent cases of high-profile land seizure. Lebert provides a brief historical
sketch of the ways colonial rule and the issue of race have shaped a struggle
for land that is tied to the need for both productive resources and political
power. The relationship of Africa to its former colonial powers (Britain in this
case) has not dissolved easily. The Zimbabwe case points to the significant
ways in which legislation and legal codes play a part in determining who is
considered landless at any point in history, and, further, who is deserving of
land and full land tenure at any time. Zimbabwe poses critical questions about
race and power that are often overlooked in general discussions of economic
or technical reform programs. Lebert’s contribution to this section provides
some new vantage points from which to reassess the struggle for land and
agrarian reform in that nation and across Africa more generally, even as the
situation deteriorates for an increasing numbers of Zimbabweans.17
Positing an interesting regional comparison, South Africa is considered in
chapter 3. Though close to Zimbabwe geographically, it shares a quite di¤erent
20 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
historical and post-colonial relationship. Wellington Thwala’s consideration of
South Africa examines the legacy of apartheid on the nation through codified
legal mandates, which used categories of race to determine definitions of property,
citizenship, and personhood. Thwala argues that this practice has left an
indelible mark on the agrarian question in South Africa, and he discusses how
the legacy of racialized land policy persists well into the twenty-first century
under new World Bank–directed reform programs.
Increasingly, the political landscape of South Africa is being shaped by an
ongoing struggle between rural and urban dwellers for land and resource allocation.
This demographic split between urban and rural dwellers in South
Africa has presented new dilemmas for political organizing around questions
of land distribution. Shifts toward industrial expansion, increased direct foreign
investment in agriculture, and national policies of modernization have
further marginalized the rural sector, with poverty rates in rural areas systematically
higher, and human development indicators systematically lower,
than in urban areas (United Nations Development Programme 2003). This
gap between the needs of rural dwellers and the dictates of an urban policy bias
is considered with relation to both national land redistribution policies and
recent land market conversion e¤orts in South Africa. Thwala closes the chapter
by exploring alternatives to the World Bank’s national agenda, calling for
a “people-centered land reform” and discussing the necessary components of
a successful alternative to land privatization in South Africa.
The case of India, Manpreet Sethi explains, is a history of broken promises
and of encroachment on many resources fundamental to farming communities
and ecological preservation: water, forests, and common property. India is
the only case that o¤ers a compelling regional example of expropriative land
reform within a larger comprehensive national reform policy. The Kerala state
reforms would easily fit in group 2 (endogenous social revolution), as landless
farmers and poor rural dwellers in that region persisted in their e¤orts to elect
a socialist government in their state and then to press for agrarian reform. Yet
most Indian states have not seen large-scale, comprehensive agrarian reforms
that have benefited large numbers of landless dwellers. In this way, India
serves as a persuasive example of why land reform alone, without a comprehensive
agrarian reform project, can quickly become part of the popular
neoliberal project to accommodate market expansion under the guise of
poverty reduction, which use the poor as justification for, but not a direct
beneficiary of, neoliberal policy making.
A recent period of urban migration in India has also posed several new
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 21
challenges for rural households, and Sethi draws attention to the question of
gender and the historical relationship of women to land and agrarian social
structure. This final chapter of part I leaves us to consider not only the issues
of historical variance, regional di¤erences, race, gender, and property relations,
but also the appeal of neoliberal populism to mobilize support for projects that
ultimately confound e¤orts for equitable resource distribution, food sovereignty,
and self-sufficiency.
Together these cases paint a varied historical picture of land reform. While
each nation has been brought closer to world markets by neoliberal interventions,
their trajectories are still deeply weighed down by the ghosts of their
pasts. In part II, we analyze the themes of these di¤erent histories, and in part
III, we investigate the alternative trajectories that, as ever, continue to be fought
for in the parliaments, policy rooms, streets, and fields of the Global South.
22 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform
in the Twenty-first Century
Michael Courville and Raj Patel
We have a real problem with land tenancy; land distribution—
mucho tierra en pocos manos (much land in few hands)—not
everyone has land and everyone needs some!
—Honduran small-scale farmer
3
Although more people now live in cities than in rural areas, a significant proportion
of the world’s poor still live in the countryside. For them, no less than
for their homeless counterparts in towns and cities, landlessness remains a
pervasive social problem. From the dawn of modern capitalism in sixteenthcentury
Britain (Wood 2000) to contemporary land claims in Zimbabwe
(Moyo 2000; Moyo and Yeros 2005) land has been, and continues to be, at the
center of rural conflict.1
A constant theme in conflicts over land is control, both of the land itself and
of material resources and uses associated with it, such as water, wood, minerals,
grazing and gathering. This control hinges on property rights. The ability
to own and transfer possession of land through private property, in turn,
has invariably been predicated on other forms of economic, social, and cultural
power. At the same time, the development and concentration of private property
rights have typically been mechanisms for entrenching and consolidating
the power of some groups over others. Perhaps the starkest example of the
inequities propagated through the privatization of property is seen through the
lens of gender: while they produce the majority of the world’s food, for example,
women in the Global South2 own only 1 percent of the land. The dominance
of the private property model has allowed landownership to become
increasingly concentrated along existing lines of power in the hands of fewer
and fewer people, usually men. Exceptions to this rule are hard won.
Private property ignores need in favor of the demands of rule and order. As
Wood notes (2000), the instantiation of such property rights has involved nothing
less than the birth of our modern capitalist world. The transformation of
the relationship that farmers, producers, and, indeed, landlords had with the
land, turning it into an entity that can be traded and mediated by the market,
changed the character of rural life forever. The expansion of land markets had
the e¤ect of dislocating the peasantry economically, physically, and socially, first
in England and then, within an astonishingly short period of time, in the rest
of the world.
This pattern would be reproduced in the colonies, and indeed in post-
Independence America, where the independent small farmers who were
supposed to be the backbone of a free republic faced, from the beginning,
the stark choice of agrarian capitalism: at best, intense self-exploitation,
and at worst, dispossession and displacement by larger, more productive
enterprises. (Wood 2000)
The inequality resulting from this dislocation brought radical social change
across the world (Polanyi 1944; Williams 1994, 41–103). Thousands of peasants
and smallholders were pushed o¤ the land toward new cities and towns.
Once there, they became integrated into a new set of social relations that no
longer depended upon a primary relationship to the land (Brown 1988, 28–
31). During the early colonial period in the United States, in a nation that had
little actual peasantry3 and that championed free market liberalism, the swift
and uneven concentration of land was widely thought to foment social unrest.
Led by Thomas Paine, a demand for “agrarian justice” was advanced, calling
for an equal distribution of land or for just compensation to small farmers, to
avoid the ill e¤ects observed during England’s feverish land grab of the eighteenth
century (Paine 1925). This call for justice fell on deaf ears as the United
States moved toward industrial expansion and did not look back.
The increased concentration into fewer hands of agricultural land around the
world continues to this day, with little regard for the overwhelming evidence of
the landlessness4 and inequality it has caused (Herring 2000; Thiesenhusen
1995, 159–62; Umehara and Bautista 2004, 3–18). The extent of this concentration
of control undoubtedly would be more severe were it not for persistent
and ongoing resistance, with new agrarian struggles commanding the attention
of millions worldwide. The struggles of the landless in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America have brought a renewed demand for agrarian and land reform around
the world. This book provides an overview of these struggles, the issues and
policies they confront, and the links that bind them together.
4 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
The Shifting Demands for Agrarian Change
Early nineteenth-century land tenure reforms were often taken up, particularly
in Latin America, by fledgling states as they struggled to break free from their
colonial past. More often than not, the catalyst for land tenure reform and early
agrarian change during this era was the liberation of a new merchant class and
the emancipation of national elites from the vestiges of colonial power and religious
rule. The consideration of the small farmer rarely, if ever, figured into
this burgeoning expansion of colonial relations. The importance of the small
farmer, however, would come to the fore as national development projects of
the late nineteenth century began to confront the obstacle posed by feudal land
relations.
The agrarian question of the late nineteenth century pivoted on the role of
the small-farm sector and the pace of capitalism’s movement into agricultural
production. By the early twentieth century, a now-classic debate emerged in the
Soviet Union, between those who championed the inevitability of large-farm
dominance and efficiency, as argued by Karl Kautsky (1988, reprint), and the
family farm economy as a viable alternative path to development, championed
by Alexander Chayanov (1966). The former positioned the small farmer as
transitory, a shrinking class in the transition to capitalist development in the
countryside. The latter viewed the small producer as a central actor in the economic
activity of the countryside, destined to maintain an integral position
within the rural class structure. Kautsky’s analysis and argument for a more
efficient, modernized agricultural sector helped move the peasantry o¤ the
land and toward industrialized cities. The Kautskian view of agrarian change
shared much of the optimism found in classic theories of industrialization and
capitalist transition at the turn of the twentieth century; it was a vision that captured
the imaginations of most world leaders struggling for independence, and
it shaped the policies of revolutionary nations aiming for rapid, large-scale conversion
of the agricultural sector. The small-farm path to development was,
conversely, often viewed as reactionary, anachronistic, and romantic.
Twentieth-century industrial production biases directed the practice of
most national rural development schemes toward input-intensive, monocultural
production that, crucially, required large contiguous areas of land in order
to be successful. Sowing the seeds of a new “national agriculture” along these
lines, governments turned away from the rural poor, who had their own vision
for agrarian change. The Chayanovian view of a di¤erent rural vision, based
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 5
on family farms and peasant cooperatives, has its echoes today in peasant
movement struggles for agrarian reform (see the conclusion in this volume).
The national reorganization of the countryside in favor of industrial agriculture
was made possible, paradoxically, by struggles for national liberation,
which drew heavily on ideas of land being for the people. From the end of the
Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, e¤orts for independence
from colonialization were su¤used with the rhetoric of democracy, equality,
and rights, while they bore di¤ering visions of land and agrarian reform for
national change. The extent to which this rhetoric matched reality depended
on a complex amalgam of domestic and international circumstances and
choices, with highly variable outcomes in di¤erent countries (as we detail
below). With the end of the Cold War, however, the debate over land redistribution
has narrowed dramatically. Formerly a central point in a program of
postcolonial independence, agrarian and land reform programs are now
framed by considerations of equity and production efficiency arbitrated by the
World Bank, with the full support of international finance institutions and
their network of local elites.
This shift in focus di¤ers dramatically from the original understanding of
agrarian reform as a means to a range of outcomes including dignity, justice,
and sovereignty, and as a platform in a broader process of national enfranchisement
and democracy. Today, it is possible to see a convergence of agrarian
policies in di¤erent countries, shaped by each nation’s domestic political
considerations but tending toward a common set of features: property, scale,
technology, and the market. This is the neoliberalization of agrarian policy—
a process that has its analogues across a range of other domains, from trade
to the role of the state (Magdo¤, Foster, and Buttel 2000).
Neoliberal agrarian reforms diagnose, and prescribe policies for, rural
areas in ways that di¤er significantly from the national liberation projects of
the twentieth century. Through this analytical paradigm shift, the policies to
which the term “land reform” refers have altered beyond recognition from
their mid–twentieth century counterparts. Most centrally, redistributive stateled
agrarian reform is unthinkable within this new paradigm. Instead, policy
discussions now highlight considerations of efficiency, making issues of
equality and distributive justice secondary, if they are considered at all. Many
of the most prominent and recent arguments for and against land reform
since the Cold War have come to pivot on economic questions (de Janvry and
Sadoulet 1989; de Janvry et al. eds. 2001; Kay 2002a; Deininger et al. 2003;
Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz 2002). Along the way, an interest in small farmer
6 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
efficiency has reemerged as a legitimate debate and policy concern. Many World
Bank development economists have come around to the view that the redistribution
of land to small farmers would lead to greater overall productivity and economic
dynamism (Deininger 1999; Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder 1995), a
view long since arrived at by others (see Barret 1993; Berry and Cline 1979;
Cornia 1985; Ellis 1993; Feder 1985; Lappé et al. 1998; Prosterman and Riedinger
1987; Rosset 1999; Sobhan 1993; Tomich, Kilby, and Johnston 1995).
It is a measure of the success of this neoliberal reframing of policy that even
those scholars and policy makers who side with arguments for redistributive
land reform find themselves doing so on terms of economic growth—as
increased Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—and not on terms of justice, food
sovereignty,5 equality, or rural transformation. Nonetheless, it is useful to see,
for example, as Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz (2002) have demonstrated, using
what they term a “heterodox economic framework” (though see Byres 2004a,
b), that without a redistribution of land in the Global South, economic growth
will continue to evade the best e¤orts at top-down development, and the chasm
between poverty and wealth will continue to deepen. Griffin, Khan, and
Ickowitz (2004, 362–63) o¤er a theoretical model that allows for consideration
of the political dimensions of resource distribution—land in this case—
by considering the socially sanctioned dimensions of property law and the
ways in which property rights change over time.
When and how property is defined and regulated reflects the struggle for
power in any given place and is subject to change usually in alignment with
the needs of large property owners and the goals of the state (Kerkvliet and
Selden 1998, 50–53). The case of Guatemala is helpful for illustrating this
process (see chapter 1 in this volume). The definition of public lands, or
economiendas, in colonial Guatemala was sufficient to maintain the colonial
lords’ power and access to land, but it stood in the way of the desires of the new
merchant class upon independence. Land law was reconfigured to facilitate
land seizure from the Church and taxes were brought upon the old latifundistas
who left so much land idle (Scofield 1990, 161–65; Williams 1994, 58–60).
Agrarian reform can be and has always been a political as well as an economic
demand, and it is the political aspect of redistributive reform—who calls for
the reforms and on what terms—that has been so caustic throughout the
twentieth century, and even more so in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
While it has become somewhat less controversial to call for land reform
on economic grounds (as Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz [2002] have done), economically
based arguments for land alone will not be sufficient to change the
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 7
structured inequalities of the rural sector. As the logic of neoliberalism continues
to unfold across the globe, a su¤ocating economism6 continues to choke
o¤ any demands for increased resource equality (Amin 2004).
The rise of neoliberalism has come to be associated with an antiauthoritarianism
that exacerbates the decline of an already weakened state and a concomitant
promise of “democratization.” Many liberal scholars, citizens, and
activists currently celebrate the opportunity they see for marginalized groups
to now mobilize, and for civil society, more generally, to flourish. The declining
ability of the state to regulate and direct a domestic development project
has, to some eyes, created this welcome opportunity for resistance and grassroots
empowerment. Yet, most grassroots movements find themselves struggling
to be e¤ective political forces in an age of free-market politics in which
access to the state is now mediated by direct economic power.
While it is true that the marginalized are increasingly allowed to make
demands and to organize within civil society, the reconfigured neoliberal state
stops them short of bringing their demands to fruition through government.
Through a combination of decentralization and an increased privatization of
public services, the state comes to function as an organizational tool for market
expansion, and less a vehicle for representative democracy or resource distribution.
Thus neoliberal populism creates a force that empowers people to
act without ever providing any actual mechanism to help movements realize
their goals: it has led to an era of both more political voices and increasing state
quiescence (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003; Teichman 1995). This reorganization
of the state thus forces any current demand for agrarian reform firmly within
the parameters of a depoliticized (market-oriented) project. In this way, an
emphasis on land reform alone as a means to boost agricultural productivity
avoids addressing the other dimensions of power and historical inequity that
in the current agenda have marginalized both the rural sector and the rural
poor. Similarly, a populist struggle for land that does not take into consideration
power, social rights, and the historical struggle of small farmers7 and the
landless could quickly become part of the neoliberal project and lead to
increased political exclusiveness.
A Call for Agrarian Reform from Below:
The Small Farmer and the Landless
In many nations rural dwellers still rely on the land to grow their own food and
to provide sustenance for their families (Ghimire 2001b, 17–18). Land in rural
8 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
communities is the central component ensuring the well-being and longevity
of families, much as Chayanov saw it. In this context land is not a commodity,
it is a source of life and society. Yet this foundation of life for the world’s poorest
is systematically denied to them. The exclusion from this life-giving resource
is what drives the call for land and agrarian reform from below. Basic statistics
on landholding and farm size from around the world can help to underscore
this point. In Honduras, for example, the rural population was 64 percent in
2002. A 2003 agricultural census calculated that 2.4 million hectares, or 62 percent
of the nation’s agricultural land, were under the ownership of the largest
farmers (those with 50 or more hectares), yet these farms made up only 10 percent
of the total number of farms (Courville 2005, 62–63). The total landholding
of the smallest farmers (those with less than 5 hectares) accounted for
a little more than 3.5 thousand hectares, or 9 percent of the total farmland in
the nation. It is the smallest farmers, however, who account for over 72 percent
of the total farms in the nation (Courville 2005, 62–63). The most recent data
also show a 28 percent increase in landholding concentration for the largest
farmers since the implementation of neoliberal reforms, while the smallest
farmers faced a 4 percent decline in overall landholding area.8
This is by no means a Latin American phenomenon. Uneven land concentration
has created persistent landlessness in the Philippines. Population
statistics from 2000 show that 48 percent of the Philippine population live in
rural areas and that three-quarters of the rural poor depend on farming and
agriculture for their livelihood (Balisacan 2002; Economist Intelligence Unit
[EIU] 2004, 16). Yet at the same time, official estimates during the preceding
decade report that between 58 and 65 percent of all agricultural workers were
considered to be landless at any given time (Riedinger 1990, 17–18).
Landholding in the Philippines has favored the largest landholders, who are
often linked to positions of political power and prominence, as in the case of
former president (1986–1992) Corazon Aquino. Aquino’s administration
endorsed land reform policy during her presidential tenure, but it e¤ectively
avoided major confiscations that would have dismantled the largest landholdings,
including her own family’s 6,000-hectare estate (de Guzman,
Garrido, and Manahan 2004). The 2002 Philippine agricultural census found
that while the total number of farms since the 1991 census had increased by
4.6 percent, the average landholding of small farmers fell from 2.5 to 2
hectares. The limited data on land tenure makes this change hard to interpret,
but the ine¤ectiveness of past reforms and the questionable actions of past
administrations suggest a continued trend toward the erosion of small-farm
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 9
landholdings. This, in part, has mobilized small farmers across the nation to
call for agrarian reform that is more transparent and that is designed not by
the landed and political elites, but by those who seek land for subsistence
(Borras 2003a; Llanto and Ballesteros 2003, 3–5).
The trend of land concentration and exclusion has also shaped the fate of
small producers and indigenous people in Africa. Take, for instance, the case
of Tanzania, which struggled to escape a colonial legacy of large co¤ee farms
and plantation agriculture established under German and English rule. In the
late 1960s, shortly after independence, the Tanzanian government removed
the Masai people from their ancestral territory in an e¤ort to collectivize agriculture,
dismantle colonial land-tenure patterns, and abolish plantation agriculture
(Hyden 1980). The reform relied on the invocation of a fictive Masai
collectivity, which was supposed to provide the necessary dynamism for
socialized village agriculture. The reform e¤ort failed in large part. A decline
in agricultural production followed. This brought increased private investment
and a voracious land grab from foreign developers that continued to keep the
Masai from their ancestral lands (Williams 1996, 218). Forty years after
Tanzanian independence, food security is still elusive, and the country’s agricultural
export production remains under the control of foreign investors
(Mihayo 2003; Ponte 2004, 622–25; Skarstein 2005, 334). Furthermore, 48
percent of Tanzania has been designated as wildlife preserve, even though as
recently as 2001, 63 percent of the population still relied on agriculture and
fishing for subsistence (Economist Intelligence Unit 2004, 15). The land
squeeze has increased the number of Masai employed in the newly established
safari tourist industry, which continues to funnel the lion’s share of GDP into
foreign pockets (ole Ndaskoi 2003a, 2003b). Many landless Masai struggle to
survive, earning meager wages while trying to maintain some of their traditional
hunting and gathering rights on state lands, to feed themselves and their
families (ole Ndaskoi 2003a).
How such uneven land concentration arises—whether in Honduras, the
Philippines, or Tanzania—is no mystery. Though varied, the agents that
account for these examples of uneven land concentration are invariably acting
within a broad macroeconomic climate that privileges large-scale industry.
Modern production schemes such as logging, dam construction, tourism,
large-scale agricultural export, and cattle ranching are hungry for land, and
their land consumption pushes rural communities to the margins in almost
every case (Williams 1986). Rather than being protected by the state, small
farmers, indigenous communities, and peasants have been forced by govern-
10 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
ments, under the banner of “broad-based rural development,” to work within
the demands of the market. The agricultural modernization championed by
governments and other global elites does not necessarily lead to new opportunities
for rural people, who are, if they were not already, marginal to the
increased GDP of national development (Bryceson 2001; Carter and Barham
1996; Kay 1997). International financing of the agricultural sector builds a very
uneven playing field that is tilted against small producers, and the net economic
gains of world competition invariably involve vast gain for a few and
devastating loss for many.
Though part of a profoundly political project, neoliberal land policy tries to
smother its own politics, couching its interventions as purely “technical” or
expedient (Ferguson 1990). Through this “technicalized” policy, small producers
and the rural poor around the world continue to be squeezed out of
national development schemes. The landless have, however, fought back.
Indeed, despite e¤orts to depoliticize the claims of landless people for agrarian
reform, there is ample evidence that the failure of the neoliberal project is
what has fueled the repoliticization of the very people it has excluded (Patel
2006). They have fought back not by adopting the language of technical
efficiency or expediency, but by means of political struggle, direct action, or
strategic linkages with international support systems or nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).
Demonstrating that neoliberalism will fail in theory is one thing; showing
how it fails in fact is quite another. Listening to the experiences of those who
have endured the onslaught of modern agrarian reform policies, not only do
we see the theoretical deficiencies of the agrarian reform program, we learn
how this program, at best, willfully ignores existing power relations, thus compounding
them and exacerbating the inequalities that result. This is important
because, although the attempt to paper over historical inequalities has been
successful—to the extent that a range of government policies in the Global
South are premised on their irrelevance—the on-the-ground experience of
power persists and, with it, the possibility of other approaches to agrarian politics.
At the time this book goes to press, for example, the South African government
has taken a stern line in opposing any further expansion of its land
program on the grounds that such a move would endanger “investor
confidence.” Yet even within the ruling African National Congress (ANC),
many grassroots party members remain convinced of the necessity for broader
powers of land confiscation and of their wider implementation. Still, the belief
that land reform should happen within a paradigm of “willing buyer–willing
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 11
seller” is pervasive within most development circles. Indeed, South Africa is
one of many “success stories” that the World Bank has attempted to spin in
the Global South, with the explicit aim of furthering its policies. In this book,
we consider these policy experiments and their failings—the Bank’s “success”
stories are demonstrably inefficient, failing on the Bank’s own terms (see chapter
5 in this volume). But the issue of the success or failure of a land reform
policy is even subtler than just World Bank policy failure, and has to do with
the fact that the terms for understanding land reform success and failure have
shifted over the last few decades.
There are currently at least two competing frameworks for establishing “success”
in agrarian reform. The first, rooted in the World Bank, sees efficiency and
e¤ectiveness9 as the defining characteristics of successful land reform. This
framework holds much of the politics, and the allocation of resources having
to do with agriculture, as a constant. Over the past decade, during which land
reform has existed under these parameters, this mode of agrarian reform has
established itself as, at best, a palliative approach, maintaining the status quo
while tinkering on the margins in order to address the most prominent and
acute symptoms of rural dispossession. Before the (as yet incomplete) capture
of policy options by neoliberalism, land reform was, to a greater or lesser extent,
part of a broader series of interventions in agrarian and national reform projects,
encompassing considerations of nationhood, identity, employment, history,
the Cold War, decolonization, and the provision of food. In these circumstances,
metrics of success were far more ambiguous and varied.
A second contemporary framework for posing “the land question” is
o¤ered by La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement,10 whose
framework is inherently plural. It demands a democratic process in which a
range of people not only “participate,” that is, play a central role in setting the
agenda, but also shape and dictate the contours of agrarian policy (Patel 2006).
The terms of reference for this kind of land reform are not written in
Washington, but in the fields—and defining its success or failure is in itself
a democratic project, informed by a history of struggle. Successful land
reform, under this rubric, depends on the political and historical context at the
time reform is implemented, but it invariably involves a mass democratic
engagement and will result in systemic, widespread redistribution, requiring
a deep commitment from the state. In most cases, though not all, the poorest
need the state to protect them, to fund their projects, and to engage in the radical
redistribution that will ensure that the reform involves more than simply
a cosmetic change. Successful land reform will be, in a word, political. The
12 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
emphasis on the political is important to bear in mind, when contrasting it
with the current crop of supposed Bank successes.
Land and Agrarian Reform after World War II
A first step toward understanding the neoliberalization of agrarian reform and
the World Bank model is to look more closely at the historical variance of agrarian
reforms worldwide since World War II. This period (1945–2000) covers
the process of decolonization and a reconfiguration of the international trading
system. This reconfiguration (Friedmann 1982) had the e¤ect, after their
nominal independence, of leaving many nations in the Global South shackled
to their preindependence economic roles as producers of agricultural exports
and natural resources for their former colonizers. The entrenchment of colonial
economic relations, within the emerging nation-states of the thendesignated
“third world,” was a design feature of the postwar settlement
(Hobsbawm 1994). Toward the end of the Second World War, the Allied powers
held a landmark conference at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, at which
the architecture for many of today’s international financial institutions was laid
out. The web of world markets became more binding through these organizations
as lending and credit became new carrots for shaping the development
policies of the emergent nations, and these nations assumed mostly dependent
positions within this nexus.
A major outcome of this conference was the establishment and development
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB).
These international financial institutions were developed by the victors of the
war in an attempt to maintain international economic stability. In many
ways, these institutions have worked to shape the function of land within
developing nations, and they have a longstanding relationship to national
banking systems that have continued to finance large-scale agricultural modernization
and expansion in the Global South (Bello 1994). Indeed, it is possible
to view the considerable resources—political and military, as well as
financial—invested in these institutions’ success as a sign of the threat posed
by agrarian reform to the core nations after World War II. To understand this
situation, it is essential to explore how the meaning of land reform has
changed through the latter half of the twentieth century up to now. A brief look
at a few nations from the Global South will help illustrate the variance in the
conceptualization of land reform.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, four nations had already engaged
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 13
in varying degrees of land reform e¤orts as part of their plans for independence,
national development, and change. As early as 1910 Mexico, China,
Guatemala, and the former Soviet Union all made direct e¤orts to alter the
relationship between land and peasantry. Di¤erent assumptions about the role
of the peasantry in these four nations became the impetus for the redistribution
of land and the reorganization of relationships in the agricultural sector
(Enríquez 2003, 2004; Kerkvliet and Selden 1998; Lewin 1968; Thiesenhusen
1995). These early e¤orts ranged from the peasant revolution–driven land
reforms in China and the rather more anti-peasant transformations of the
Soviet Union, to the reorganization of export agriculture coupled with the rise
of popular struggle in Guatemala11 and the radical agrarian struggle of Mexico.
Each of these nations successfully moved land into the hands of the landless,
but that alone did not correct persistent, uneven distribution of wealth and
power in the countryside.
In the case of Mexico, peasants have fought and struggled for land both
before and after the implementation of larger revolutionary movements for
independence. The hacienda system was weakened through the revolutionary
transitions, and land was redistributed to campesinos, but securing social
equality for campesinos has been an ongoing and increasingly frustrated project
(Henriques and Patel 2003; Thiesenhusen 1995, 29–49). In the Soviet
Union, peasants reluctantly participated in land reform e¤orts, and in most
instances faced violence, murder, and increased rural conflict throughout the
process (Lewin 1968, 107–31). Land tenure in the Soviet Union was mostly
reshaped through e¤orts at collectivization and the establishment of large state
farms, changes driven primarily not by the needs of rural producers, but by
urban demands for cheap food, a Kautskian view of the peasantry, and an inaccurate
analysis of rural society by party elites.12 In China, by contrast, the needs
of rural populations were foremost, and many of the beneficiaries of land
reform participated in the revolutionary transformation of power relations in
rural areas (Hinton 1996).
On the other end of the distributive continuum is the case of Guatemala.
Early colonial relationships to export markets brought about some limited,
but notable, land tenure reforms prior to the twentieth century (Williams
1994, 61 – 69). This early demand for land tenure reform emerged in
response to the conflicting interests of indigenous communities, political
elites, and large-scale domestic co¤ee producers. The latter saw some
benefit in extending the small producers’ tenure—allowing them to grow
food for their own consumption, thusrequiring less income to sustain their
14 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
families—while maintaining reliance on seasonal peasant labor at very low
wages on large coffee haciendas. It wasn’t until the period from 1944 to 1952,
however, that the nation pursued an official program of land and agrarian
reform. With this formal state commitment to agrarian reform came much
social upheaval that, on first glance, would suggest a redistributive success—
a case of increased smallholder beneficiaries and the reorganization of rural
social relations. Yet, despite the upheaval and international attention brought
about by these official e¤orts at reform, the impact of the land redistribution
that occurred during the period was quickly reversed. (see chapter 1 this
volume)
This brief consideration of the four countries that saw significant land
reform before World War II point to the implications of the larger structural
(i.e., political, economic, historical) dimensions of agrarian change. These
cases also helped to stamp in the minds of policy elites elsewhere the very real
possibility of radical land reform implementation through violence, carried out
perhaps by those most oppressed under current regimes. Following the interruption
of World War II, these examples informed the thinking of those on
both sides of the Cold War. Communism, or the Cold War fear of its expansion,
fueled a number of post–World War II land reform e¤orts promoted by the
United States and its allies to deter unwieldy revolutions from below. And
behind these ideologically charged e¤orts remained the questions—summed
up in the refrain with which we began the chapter—of who controls the land,
who is entitled to use it, and for what ends. It would be an exaggeration to say
that land reform shaped the Cold War, but it is useful to see the struggle for
land as part of a broader struggle over the meaning of and limits to property.
While the contours of power and the mechanisms through which land reform
was e¤ected shaped the ultimate success or failure of land reform e¤orts in
every country experiencing such reforms after World War II, the question of
property burned at the heart of agrarian reform.
With the above framework in mind, a team of researchers13 from the Land
Research Action Network (LRAN) compared historical data on formal land
reform e¤orts14 in twenty countries since World War II (see figure 1).15 Though
varied, the impetus for land redistribution in these nations often reflected
significant e¤orts to address economic stagnation, to acquire independence,
to build political solidarity, and/or to “develop” national agricultural export production.
Figure 1 lists the twenty countries chronologically by date of land
reform implementation and by period of comparison.16 From these historical
experiences, the authors identified four distinct categories of land reform
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 15
implementation: Cold War proxy, endogenous social revolution, postwar allied
consolidation, and endogenous political compromise.
Group 1: Cold War Proxies (Cases: El Salvador, Honduras, Philippines, South
Vietnam). Reforms in these countries were pursued in the e¤ort to quell
peasant unrest, stave o¤ larger revolutionary action, and/or comply with the
US and/or Eastern Bloc foreign and economic policies. Formal land reform
polices were a mix of expropriation and redistribution of public lands.
Group 2: Endogenous Social Revolution (Cases: China, Cuba, Mexico, North
Vietnam, former Soviet Union, Kerala state [India]). These reforms emerged
in response to social pressures and revolutionary platforms or national struggles
for independence. In these cases land reform was implemented along
with more comprehensive agrarian reforms aiming to address longstanding
inequalities regarding access to land and to reduce persistent rural poverty.
Here the state played an active role in instituting and carrying out reform
policies. Large amounts of land were expropriated from large landholders
and redistributed to landless beneficiaries.
Group 3: Postwar Allied Consolidation (Cases: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan,
Germany). These land reforms were carried out in concert with industrial
expansion and other economic reforms by the state, with the support of the
major post–World War II political players, and aimed to avoid persistent
inequality in land tenure before engaging in industrial expansion. Land was
expropriated from large landholders and redistributed to landless beneficiaries
by fiat.
Group 4: Endogenous Political Compromise (Cases: Brazil, Guatemala, India,
South Africa, Zimbabwe). These reforms emerged largely in response to a
combination of pressures exerted by large social movements, landless organizing
and government policy making that aimed to meet new demands of
export-oriented agricultural production. Limited amounts of land were
expropriated from large landholders and redistributed to a limited number
of landless beneficiaries.
While these typologies are not hard and fast—many countries fell simultaneously
under the categories of Cold War proxies and post–World War II allied
consolidation e¤orts in the attempt to build bulwarks against communism—
they reveal that among the most sweeping land reforms (i.e., swift, statebacked
reforms, involving a large number of families and leaving little quar-
16 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
ter for existing elites) were those preemptively imposed by capitalists—
notably under the postwar allied consolidation category. A measure of the success
of these land reforms has been the extent to which all the countries that
experienced them have developed strong and robust internationally linked
economies (though only after a prolonged period of growth fueled by domestic
industrial protection) (Hart 2002). A little less robust have been the compromises
forged through endogenous social revolution, and more fissiparous
still have been the settlements agreed through endogenous political compromise,
with the most extreme cases of land injustice residing in those states that
were Cold War battle grounds. Yet the Cold War a¤ected all land reforms,
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 17
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
2000
2004
FIGURE 1 Periods of land reform in select countries, 1945–2004
Reform periods Country
1945–20041 Mexico
1945–19892 Russia**
1945–20043* Guatemala
1945–19704 China
1945–1955 Japan
1945–1990 Germany
1945–1953 Taiwan
1948–1974 South Korea
1949–1993 India
1953–1974 North Vietnam
1959–1965 Cuba
1962–1973 Chile
1962–1992 Honduras
1969–2004* Brazil
1970–1973 South Vietnam
1975–2004* Thailand
1980–2004* Zimbabwe
1980–2004* El Salvador
1988–2004* Philippines
1993–2004* South Africa
*ongoing
**former Soviet Union
1 (1917); 2 (1923); 3 (1944); 4 (1910).
whether directly, through endogenous struggles between capitalism and communism,
or by the perceived threat of communism in “frontline states.”
The end of the Cold War heralded at least the temporary end of the possibility
of radical land reform programs. While it was inconceivable that land
could be redistributed through a willing buyer–willing seller approach at the
beginning of the Cold War, by the Cold War’s end it was inconceivable that it
could be done any other way. By the early 1970s land reform policy making had
already began to shift to a “one-size-fits-all” market-assisted land reform
(MALR) imposed by the IMF, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), and the World Bank. A general shift from the stateled
agrarian reforms of the earlier part of the century to a demand-driven,
MALR process ensued (Borras, chapter 5 in this volume; Kay 2002a). The proponents
of this kind of reform claimed that the state-led reforms failed to distribute
land adequately to the landless and resulted, for the most part, in a distortion
of land markets, and they argued that this prevented efficient producers
from acquiring land and encouraged inefficient farmers to continue farming.
Borras (chapter 5) provides an exemplary treatment of the substance of these
arguments. The issue of whether or not there was any truth to these arguments
was almost irrelevant to their reception. As Kelsey (1995) notes in a
di¤erent context, a great part of the successful adoption of the neoliberal
regime comes through its ability to claim that “there is no alternative.” In
many instances, it certainly feels as if there is none. Under neoliberal agrarian
reform, there has been a concerted e¤ort to disparage people living in rural
areas, de-skill farmers, and demobilize their organizations to remove the possibility
of an alternative. Yet the alternative persists.
The tragedy of neoliberal land policy, as each of the chapters in this book
shows, is that it prevents successful land reform—reform that lifts people out
of poverty, increases levels of resource equality, raises living standards, ensures
the subsistence of the rural dweller, and, in some cases, even increases agricultural
export production (de Janvry and Sadoulet 1989; Herring 2000;
Sobhan 1993). Successful land reform can also result in the improved environmental
protection of land when stewardship is granted to those who depend
directly on the land for their own well-being and survival (Holt-Giménez 2002;
Ghimire 2001b). Land reform programs, however, are necessary but not
sufficient to accomplish these goals. They require integration into a broader
strategy for rural development that also considers the landless and the small
producer as the focus of several coordinated e¤orts (Patel 2003).
The promarket argument fails to acknowledge not only the noncommod-
18 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
ity nature of food production, but also the falsity of the assumption that rising
GDP inevitably leads to decreased poverty for rural dwellers. Conceptualizing
agriculture as a commodity-oriented system of production, the World
Bank’s MALR models and the neoliberal economic models that spawned it
avoid any direct consideration of the relationship between the land and the
majority of the world’s poor.
About the Cases in Part I
The first part of this book consists of four case studies representing nations
from each region in which LRAN has focused its e¤orts. Guatemala,
Zimbabwe, South Africa, and India serve as exemplars of reform e¤orts categorized
as endogenous political compromise in group 4, above. Regardless
of the specifics in each case, all four countries have experienced one or more
historical periods of land reform that fell short of the hopes and demands of
the most resource-poor agents in each nation. These shortcomings are not surprising,
of course, given that compromise was required for the implementation
of any land reform policy at all. As such, compromise is one of the few
attributes common to all these national cases. The African cases share some
regional similarities as well, but even with the regional overlap there is quite
a bit of variance among these countries. Yet, despite the national di¤erences
described by each of the authors of these four studies, all four nations have
strangely found themselves facing similar policy options at the turn of the
twenty-first century.
It is this common point of arrival that leads these four authors to take stock
and raise important research and policy questions with regard to the homogenized
land and agrarian reform policy being imposed upon their nations.
Through brief historical review, demographic comparison, and general policy
analysis, the four cases in this section begin to highlight failures and problems
associated with the received neoliberal model that has unfolded before them.
The remainder of the book will explore in more depth and with greater analysis
the themes, criticisms, and alternatives introduced throughout part I. A
brief overview of each chapter in part I will help to direct the reader toward
some of the more salient challenges now facing these nations, on their path
toward implementing a land reform that will more directly benefit the landless
and resource poor.
The first chapter, by Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka, focuses on the long, contradictory
agrarian reform policies of Guatemala. The Guatemala case high-
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 19
lights the changing role of the state with regard to the land question in general,
and the implementation of agrarian reform policy, in particular. The state
played a crucial role in shaping land policy both before and after the World War
II era, while it has also implemented formal policies of repression—enlisting
military force when necessary—to stop any demands that have threatened the
power of landed elites tied to export production. The history of agrarian
reform in Guatemala is a violent one. Past and present e¤orts at agrarian
change have been accompanied by much hardship and loss throughout the
countryside. The authors delve into the outcomes of earlier attempts at land
reform and find them mostly hollow. A brief review of landholding shows that
the beneficiaries of past e¤orts have largely been those who sought compromise,
via the state, with landless peasants and indigenous peoples: the landed
elite and agribusiness holders. Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka emphasize the
limitations of these earlier gains and briefly explore the ways that peace and
human rights movements in the 1990s began to impact the breadth and depth
of popular political participation. The role of the 1996 peace accords is considered
in this chapter, as is the ongoing impact of a century of agricultural
export on the nation’s land tenure system. Finally, the author highlights the
ways in which political and landed elites—often one and the same—continue
to use the rhetoric of land reform to appease foreign interests, both political
and economic, as new land market conversions have become the emphasis of
state policy.
In chapter 2 Tom Lebert chronicles the Zimbabwe case, one of the most
recent cases of high-profile land seizure. Lebert provides a brief historical
sketch of the ways colonial rule and the issue of race have shaped a struggle
for land that is tied to the need for both productive resources and political
power. The relationship of Africa to its former colonial powers (Britain in this
case) has not dissolved easily. The Zimbabwe case points to the significant
ways in which legislation and legal codes play a part in determining who is
considered landless at any point in history, and, further, who is deserving of
land and full land tenure at any time. Zimbabwe poses critical questions about
race and power that are often overlooked in general discussions of economic
or technical reform programs. Lebert’s contribution to this section provides
some new vantage points from which to reassess the struggle for land and
agrarian reform in that nation and across Africa more generally, even as the
situation deteriorates for an increasing numbers of Zimbabweans.17
Positing an interesting regional comparison, South Africa is considered in
chapter 3. Though close to Zimbabwe geographically, it shares a quite di¤erent
20 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
historical and post-colonial relationship. Wellington Thwala’s consideration of
South Africa examines the legacy of apartheid on the nation through codified
legal mandates, which used categories of race to determine definitions of property,
citizenship, and personhood. Thwala argues that this practice has left an
indelible mark on the agrarian question in South Africa, and he discusses how
the legacy of racialized land policy persists well into the twenty-first century
under new World Bank–directed reform programs.
Increasingly, the political landscape of South Africa is being shaped by an
ongoing struggle between rural and urban dwellers for land and resource allocation.
This demographic split between urban and rural dwellers in South
Africa has presented new dilemmas for political organizing around questions
of land distribution. Shifts toward industrial expansion, increased direct foreign
investment in agriculture, and national policies of modernization have
further marginalized the rural sector, with poverty rates in rural areas systematically
higher, and human development indicators systematically lower,
than in urban areas (United Nations Development Programme 2003). This
gap between the needs of rural dwellers and the dictates of an urban policy bias
is considered with relation to both national land redistribution policies and
recent land market conversion e¤orts in South Africa. Thwala closes the chapter
by exploring alternatives to the World Bank’s national agenda, calling for
a “people-centered land reform” and discussing the necessary components of
a successful alternative to land privatization in South Africa.
The case of India, Manpreet Sethi explains, is a history of broken promises
and of encroachment on many resources fundamental to farming communities
and ecological preservation: water, forests, and common property. India is
the only case that o¤ers a compelling regional example of expropriative land
reform within a larger comprehensive national reform policy. The Kerala state
reforms would easily fit in group 2 (endogenous social revolution), as landless
farmers and poor rural dwellers in that region persisted in their e¤orts to elect
a socialist government in their state and then to press for agrarian reform. Yet
most Indian states have not seen large-scale, comprehensive agrarian reforms
that have benefited large numbers of landless dwellers. In this way, India
serves as a persuasive example of why land reform alone, without a comprehensive
agrarian reform project, can quickly become part of the popular
neoliberal project to accommodate market expansion under the guise of
poverty reduction, which use the poor as justification for, but not a direct
beneficiary of, neoliberal policy making.
A recent period of urban migration in India has also posed several new
The Resurgence of Agrarian Reform in the Twenty-first Century 21
challenges for rural households, and Sethi draws attention to the question of
gender and the historical relationship of women to land and agrarian social
structure. This final chapter of part I leaves us to consider not only the issues
of historical variance, regional di¤erences, race, gender, and property relations,
but also the appeal of neoliberal populism to mobilize support for projects that
ultimately confound e¤orts for equitable resource distribution, food sovereignty,
and self-sufficiency.
Together these cases paint a varied historical picture of land reform. While
each nation has been brought closer to world markets by neoliberal interventions,
their trajectories are still deeply weighed down by the ghosts of their
pasts. In part II, we analyze the themes of these di¤erent histories, and in part
III, we investigate the alternative trajectories that, as ever, continue to be fought
for in the parliaments, policy rooms, streets, and fields of the Global South.
22 land and agrarian reform: historical perspectives
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