AGRARIAN REFORM POLICY ISSUES NEVER DIE

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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109.pp.465-90.
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
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