Land redistribution is the basic prerequisite
for an inclusive, broad-based development that would allow a nation to
ensure a decent standard of living for all its citizens. Access to land
by the vast majority of the landless rural population in developing countries
is an issue of social justice and basic human rights; it involves the
right to feed oneself, the right to adequate shelter, the right to employment
and, as research has shown, it also guarantees improved environmental
protection. Although many national and international institutions agree
on the need for agrarian reform in order to reduce poverty and hunger,
experiences in many developing countries suggest that little progress
has been made under existing land reforms; moreover, the number of landless
people exerting pressure on land has now increased. Globalisation has
increased the number of displaced farmers, as more land is now being used
for the large-scale, commercial, export-led production of cash crops,
and this has reduced the demand for wage employment in agriculture. In
order to survive, hundreds of farmers have no choice but to encroach on
forest land and other fragile environmental areas where the climate and
soil do not permit sustainable agriculture. Landless people and rural
workers are the most vulnerable group in rural society and, in their struggle
to gain access to land and support services, they often have to endure
serious violations of human rights.
http://www.iuf.org/iuf/LF/18-3.htm
Mere technological advances and the use of improved seeds, fertilisers,
tractors, harvesters, irrigation etc. have failed to provide millions
of small and marginal peasants worldwide with even two square meals a
day. As a result, many countries have tried to implement land reforms
for the express purpose of: abolishing intermediaries enforcing tenancy
reforms to regulate rent, secure tenure for tenants, and confer ownership
on them implementing ceilings (and floors) on land holdings appropriating
surplus land and distributing it among the landless and land poor reorganising
agricultural land including consolidation of holdings and prevention of
sub-division and land fragmentation, and establishing co-operative farming.
Landless people and their struggles have gained world attention. In Zimbabwe,
so-called veterans of the liberation war are currently confronting white
commercial farmers who control the vast majority of prime land in the
country, as the government looks the other way. While this development
need not necessarily be beneficial to all black Zimbabweans as a new class
of elites may emerge out of it, while the majority of the people sees
no improvement, the country will at least see the white settlers losing
control over the huge tracts of fertile land they had control over. At
the end of the day, one hopes that a land tenure system will be born out
of this land liberation struggle.
http://afronet.org.za/theobserver/volume6_4.htm
The success in implementing land reforms has varied from country to country.
As pointed out by James Putzel, redistributive land reforms have played
an important role in the rapid growth that South Korea and Taiwan Province of Chinawitnessed
after World War II. Chinas success in reducing poverty is also the result
of land reforms. Even the rise of Japan was founded on the land reforms
carried out in the country, something that mainstream economists decline
to acknowledge.
www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/destin/workpapers/asiasubmission.pdf
Abhijit V. Banerjee, in his paper on 'Land Reforms: Prospects and Strategies',
has pointed out that redistributive probably promotes equity as well as
efficiency. While there may be high costs attached to land redistribution
and hence alternatives like tenancy reforms may be tried, there is clearly
not enough evidence to say that tenancy reforms are an effective substitute
for land reforms. After careful consideration of the costs implied in
the process and possible alternative uses of the same resources, it is
still worth of our while to try to move to a more equitable distribution.
On market-assisted reforms he says that being very expensive, such a program
will not be able to achieve a very substantial redistribution in the near
future.
http://www.worldbank.org/research/abcde/washington_11/pdfs/banerjee.pdf
However, in most countries the reforms failed to meet the targeted
objectives. In many countries like India (unlike in the erstwhile communist
countries), appropriation of surplus land was carried out only after compensating
the owners of the land. The landlords were often successful in appropriating
more than equitable compensation. This put a huge burden on the public
exchequer, and the government could take over only a fraction of the land
it intended to redistribute. In India, in particular, benami and farzi
(fictitious) transfers took place to defeat the ceiling limits. Lack of
political will was another major reason, as more often than not the influential
politicians themselves owned acres of land above the ceilings. As Wolf
Ladenjinsky put it, while officially the states accepted the ceiling programmes,
they rejected them in practice. Absence of records was an impediment to
proving that a tenant had been cultivating a particular piece of land
for the past many days. Difference in quality of land was the chief obstacle
to consolidating land holdings. Even in cases where tenants got the ownership,
lack of resources made them borrow from their erstwhile landlord (who
doubled up as a moneylender) from whom the land was appropriated.
Nevertheless, whatever may have been the extent of success, almost every
country, at least officially, recognised the need of state-led redistributive
land reform in promoting economic development, contributing to equity
and growth, challenging socio-political hierarchies, and, in the long
run, providing political stability. Countries acknowledged the fact that
high absolute ground rent resulting from land monopoly acts as an impediment
to productivity increasing investments. Even Monica Das Gupta, Helene
Grandvoinnet and Mattia Romani of the World Bank have said that nations
have much to gain by initiating such institutional reforms.
http://econ.worldbank.org/docs/1194.pdf
However, with the advent of the capital-intensive Green Revolution technology
and mechanised farming, the efforts at redistributive land reforms were
reversed. Even while the technology was proclaimed by many as scale-neutral,
just the fact that it was costly made the distribution of gains from the
technology uneven, with the rich and prosperous farmers emerging even
richer owing to the adoption of the technology. The technology could have
benefited the poor farmers if land reforms, and subsequently land consolidation,
was completed before the introduction of the technology, and co-operativisation
was encouraged by the government through offers of easy credit and expertise
to the small peasants to enable them to make the switch to collective
farming.
In the absence of such support the small landowners simply found it uneconomical
to cultivate and often sold their plots back to the richer farmers. These
small landowners joined the stream of landless labourers, ensuring a steady
supply of cheap agricultural labour to work on the lands of the richer
farmers. With international donor agencies, including the World Bank,
backing and funding Green Revolution technology, whatever success the
countries depending on these agencies had achieved in the area of redistributive
land reforms was overturned. These countries then started witnessing what
may be called reverse land reforms, meaning increasing concentration of
land holdings in the hands of big farmers. And the technology being capital-intensive
getting jobs on farm became even more difficult for the burgeoning class
of agricultural labourers.
Of late, even the World Bank has realised the importance of redistributive
land reforms. It has finally accepted the contention that inequitable
access to land impedes growth, and that institutional factors are as important
as technological ones in improving agricultural productivity. The initiatives
of the World Bank in pushing forward these reforms include titling, registries,
land market facilitation, market-led redistribution and credit, technical
assistance, and marketing support. Governments and aid agencies are following
the lead of the Bank, aggressively implementing some or all of these reforms.
From South Africa, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil,
to the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and countless others,
various combinations of these reforms are either being carried out or
their possible implementation is a hot topic of national debate.
However funding from private and international donors comes with too many
strings attached. The World Bank's obsession with establishment of land
markets and market-assisted land reforms has, more often than not, nullified
even the best of its intentions to redistribute land in many developing
countries, particularly those in Latin America and Africa. The Policy
Research Report (PRR) of the Bank on 'Land Institutions and Policy' reflects
such an obsession.
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/essdext.nsf/24DocByUnid/
3F99BD0221CBDA6285256BE20074D2FA/$FILE/PRR_English.pdf
Commenting on the World Bank's Policy Research Report, Armin Paasch says
that it is remarkable that even the Bank has accepted that market-assisted
land reforms have failed in South Africa and Colombia. What is surprising
is that even then the PRR fails to analyse critically the reasons of the
failure, and continues with the same set of prescriptions in other countries.
The Bank blames local factors for the failures. Even in Brazil, where
the reforms have been hailed as a success by the Bank, preliminary evidence
of other independent analyses however suggests the opposite.
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/essdext.nsf/24DocByUnid/
6DFA63C5C737598885256C9F004FB99C/$FILE/APaasch.pdf
What is worrying is the fact that national governments cannot do without
such loans and aids from the Bank and private and international donors
as they mostly suffer from lack of resources needed to carry out the reforms.
donor_13.pdf
The emphasis laid by the Bank on market-assisted mechanisms of land redistribution
is going to nip the objectives of such redistribution in the bud. Under
the World Bank scheme loans and credits would be granted to the landless
to buy land at market rates from wealthy landowners and to acquire fertilizers
and technical assistance for new, marketable crops.
http://www.globalexchange.org/wbimf/ips040601.html
As Peter Rosset, the Director of Food First, has pointed out, market-assisted
reforms are bound to fail because they place a heavy burden on poor people
to repay expensive loans, often from harvests from poor soils as landowners
often choose to sell the most marginal and ecologically fragile plots
that they own. The market-assisted reforms are often viewed as an instrument
of rewarding landlords rather than for improving the livelihoods of the
landless poor.
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2001/w01v7n1.html
Rosset has further warned that market-assisted land reforms, championed
by institutions such as the World Bank, are threatening sustainable land
redistribution in a growing number of countries. "The market responds
to money, not human need, and it is hard to see how the poor will benefit,"
says Rosset. In his report, "Tides Shift on Agrarian Reform: New
Movements Show the Way," Rosset critiques World Bank-led land reforms
and highlights mass movements driving alternative reforms from below.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Reforming_System/Agrarian_Reform.html
Market-led policies proscribed by the World Bank and the IMF have in fact
prevented land reforms from taking place in countries like South Africa
and eliminated traditional community based land tenure systems in Melanasia
to make it possible to individually own, buy and sell land.
sacountryrep.pdf
http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/mnpapua.html
Kenyan human rights activists are adding their voices to those already
opposed to the World Bank driven land reforms, which they say, seek to
make land "just another commodity" to be subjected to the whims
of market forces, at the expense of millions of landless peasants.
http://www.afrol.com/News/ken008_landreform2.htm
And as Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel found out, market-assisted land reforms
and privatisation of land holdings have also acted against the interests
of women with women-led households in particular being the worst affected.
http://www.aucegypt.edu/academic/src/conference/papers/
Privatization of Land Rights.pdf
The aim of land reforms is to facilitate changes in land ownership and
occupational rights. Such changes will alter the income distribution,
social status and political power structure. However, the model of land
reforms being espoused by the World Bank is in no way going to achieve
the above objectives, nor is it going to mitigate the abject poverty of
the landless and the marginal farmers. National governments need to expropriate
land holdings above the ceiling and distribute these among the landless
and the marginal farmers free of cost, and provide these new owners with
adequate credit facilities so that they do not fall back into indebtedness
through borrowing from the same people who owned the land before.