Land reform in developing countries

Abstract

"An approach to sustainable and equitable development requires well informed, purposeful courses of action by the state and other concerned social actors. Land tenure institutions have to be continually adapted and regulated to serve the public interest . But unless the institutions and policies regulating rights and obligations in access to land are somehow made primarily accountable to poor majorities, to low-income minorities and unborn generations instead of to currently dominant corporate and other powerful groups public interest can easily be interpreted to mean the opposite of sustainable development. A review of twentieth century land reforms in Latin America and in a few other developing countries is instructive, as it brings out several of these controversial issues. Each case is to some extent unique, but there are also common features permitting qualified generalizations. Land reforms are considered to have occurred in countries where more than approximately one fifth of the agricultural land has been redistributed to benefit over one tenth of the rural poor, over a period of a decade or less. Social movements with important peasant support led to revolutionary regimes implementing significant land reforms in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua. Similar processes produced massive land reforms in China and Viet Nam. Popularly based insurgencies in Peru and El Salvador convinced nationalist military officers wielding state power to undertake land reforms. Important land reforms by authoritarian regimes in South Korea and Taiwan had partially similar origins. Democratically elected regimes in Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Venezuela and Chile all initiated important land reforms. Political parties in each of these cases sought increased electoral support from low-income rural voters as well as being pressured by a wide range of other clients and allies with frequently conflicting interests in reform. In all of these reforms, peasant organizations and the state regime of the moment were central actors. The often fleeting nature of popularly based state regimes supporting serious agrarian reforms is well illustrated by the Latin American experiences. In Mexico the most sweeping phase of the reform occurred during the Cardénas administration in the 1930s, with state-encouraged militant support by armed peasant organizations. Credit, marketing, technical assistance and similar state institutions were created or redirected to serve reform beneficiaries needs. This resulted in significant increases in peasant food production and incomes. Subsequent administrations after 1940 continued to redistribute land, but priorities were changed to promoting commercial production by large-scale private farmers while leaving the peasants as dependent clients of the state s ruling party. In Bolivia, peasant food production and consumption increased following reform, but the marketed surplus diminished. The state was able to meet growing urban demands for food through highly subsidized imports. It directed most investments in agriculture toward private commercial producers in frontier regions while neglecting the mostly indigenous peasantry that had benefited from the land reform. Land reform had brought substantial benefits to major low-income peasant populations in both cases, but subsequent changes in the state s major political support groups, and hence its priorities, had excluded most peasant producers from playing a dynamic role in post-reform developments."(pg ii)