When
land reform
becomes the burning issue
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 28, 2005
LONDON - Fifteen white Zimbabwean
farmers, their land taken from them in one of the most
badly conceived land reform programs ever enacted,
announced recently that they have been invited to start
farming in Nigeria where land is both plentiful and, by
tradition, reasonably fairly distributed.
Land reform has been given a bad
name in Zimbabwe where the most modern and productive
farmers have been summarily stripped of their titles for
no other reason than the color of their skin. In
Venezuela, likewise, a typical Latin American country
still mired in its feudal division of land, its mercurial
president, Hugo Chávez, is stirring the issue of
land seizures, a policy that is more beholden to his
short term electoral needs than to any long term
thought-out policy for diminishing rural poverty and
inequality.
Yet careful land reform is an
absolute must in many countries - in Nepal where a
dangerous Maoist insurgency is fuelled in part by years
of neglect of the inequalities of the countryside; in
South Africa where a decade of black political power has
not done much about the 85% of the farmland being owned
by a few thousand white farmers; and in India where
successful land reform in the Communist-ruled states of
West Bengal and Kerala has highlighted what needs to be
done in the rest of the country if poverty is ever to be
conquered and Maoist-inspired insurgencies in a number of
states quelled, as they were in West Bengal.
We can identify three causes of
revolutionary violence in those countries which land
division is particularly unequal. The first is when
expectations are unchanged but the actuality worsens- as
in Ethiopia in the 1970s when drought caused severe crop
failures but landlords still insisted on their rents.
This led to the overthrow of Emperor Haile
Selassie.
The second is when expectations and
actuality remain the same but the level of opposition to
authority can no longer be managed by the government. The
collapse of the Russian army in 1917 and the return home
of the peasant soldiers, weapons in hand, was a case in
point.
The third is the traditional cause:
the revolution of rising expectations, which increase
while the actuality remains the same. This is true for
Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, parts of India and
much of Latin America.
It is not poverty alone so much as
it is blamable poverty that seems to serve as the trigger
for violence. A large number of the most violent 20th
century conflicts occurred when a substantial part of the
population was blocked from earning a secure living from
the land they tilled. Land protests played a catalytic
role in successful revolutions in Russia, Mexico, China,
Bolivia, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe.
As recently as the 1980s it was the reason for wars in
Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras.
Washington, alarmed by Cuban support for the Central
American insurgencies, threw its weight against these
peasant revolts and the land remains unfairly
divided.
It is a sad tale. But not the only
one. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have carried out
highly successful land reforms, all of which are credited
with having laid the foundations for their phenomenal
economic development. Japan's in fact was carried out by
the U.S. occupation administration headed by General
Douglas MacArthur. Taiwan's was carried out by the right
wing administration of Chiang Kai-shek who made
landowners of 60% of the former tenants. South Korea's
was pushed through by another right wing ideologue,
Syngman Rhee, who made owners of 64% of the former
tenants.
Land reform only works when it is
done carefully. This means fair compensation for those
bought out, so that they can invest in industrial
development. It means proper follow up for the new
tenants. If they have no expert counseling, no water and
no improved seeds they will quickly lower productivity,
as they have in Zimbabwe. But World Bank studies have
shown that if small farmers are given the right resources
and advice they are more productive per acre than large
farmers, as they tend the land more
intensively.
Quick land reform is not always
possible- as in India where the political and financial
hurdles are a deterrent. But, as the doyen of land
reform, Roy Prosterman of the University of Washington's
Rural Development Institute, told me in an interview, it
should be possible at the very least to give the landless
"homestead plots"- a fraction of a hectare sufficient for
a garden, fruit trees and a few animals. This would
require only 0.3% of India's arable land, transforming
our assumptions about the affordability of land
reform.
By one means or another land reform
has to be done. Otherwise much of the Third World could
be as turbulent this century as it was in the
last.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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