Land Reform

A World Survey

Russell King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367022051
• eBook ISBN: 9780429728310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book lays down some general themes and principles in the study of land reform and traces the historical evolution of the concept of land reform. It constitutes a continent-based country-by-country survey of the significant recent reforms in the less developed countries.

Part 1
Land Reform: A General Overview

1
The Challenge of Land Reform

Poverty is one of the world's greatest problems. The quest to solve it involves raising the living standards of two-thirds of the world's population. The great majority are rural folk, many of whom are denied the means for self-improvement by restricted access to their most basic need and resource—land. Throughout history there has been a continuous struggle on the part of the poor for land. Land reform has come to be a tremendously popular slogan for redistribution of wealth and promotion of economic development; this has been true in countries with such widely divergent historical, cultural and geographical backgrounds as India, Italy, Bolivia and Japan. One influential writer goes so far as to say that it is the most important social change now taking place in the world.¹

In fact, arguments for land reform fall under three main heads. The social equity argument is based on the ethical-moral premise that inequality and, worse still, exploitation, are bad things. Secondly, and partly linked to the first argument, land reform has become closely involved with ideological positions and, therefore, with political dogma. Finally, and more recently, land reform has been strongly argued on economic grounds, either for the benefit of the individual farmer, or as part of an overall development policy.

A vast amount has been written about land reform. Three bibliographies on land tenure and land reform, issued in 1955, 1959 and 1972 by FAO, contain between them some 10 000 references.² This literature covers a wide range of viewpoints and forms an uncoordinated mass of material. Few attempts have been made to develop general principles or a body of theory, either deductively or based on case studies and historical examples.³ Perhaps the nature of the topic explains this void, for each land reform has to be tailored to its own situation to be successful, taking particular account of a nation's or region's cultural heritage and economic and political conditions. But, even so, who is best equipped to write about land reform? Land itself is a term of many and varied meanings.⁴ In law it is property, in political science it is a source of power and strategy. In economics it is a factor of production and a form of capital. In social psychology it is a personalised guarantor of security; in anthropology an item of culture, and in sociology a part of the social system. In agriculture it means basically the soil. To geographers land can mean most of these things, but most of all perhaps surface land use. Material on the subject of land reform has been produced by scholars and practitioners of many different disciplines, each of whom tends to apply a biased viewpoint derived from the parent discipline.⁵ The historical approach is of value in considering the effects of past land reforms and the long term links between agrarian institutional changes and development, but most historians have relatively little knowledge of agriculture. The anthropologist's bias in favour of static descriptive studies is of little use in considerations of policy and development, while agronomists tend to concentrate solely on production aspects. The majority of general economists have traditionally had little to say on land reform, and agricultural economists, strangely, even less. Flores⁶ notes that economists react to it 'either as a subject that belongs somewhere in the prosaic underworld of farm management and the applied agricultural sciences, or as a disturbing manoevre of demagogic or activist intent which anyway would not lend itself to formal analysis.' Economists have neglected the subject because it concerns the institutional framework, which economic analysis tends to accept as given. Recent years, however, have seen a change in this situation. The formulation by the United Nations in 1951 of land tenure as an obstacle to economic development meant that to land reform's original egalitarian motive was added an economic objective. Economists could no longer ignore land reform. Their recent interest in the theme has focused on the central issues of capital formation, employment and investment for economic development, considered at length in Chapter 3. Above all, land reform is a political issue with a perennial fascination for political philosophers. Many so-called economic arguments are really political ones in disguise. Pope John, Mao Tse-Tung, President Truman and Che Guevara have all proposed interpretations of land reform. In Flores's opinion, the best writings of members of this influential group 'display towards the subject. . . sensitivity and sophistication, (and) reveal a thoroughly professional understanding of land reform, both as a supremely effective device to gain and to retain the support of the peasants, and as a deadly weapon against the landed oligarchy.'⁷

To date, however, the subject of land reform has remained an academic no-man's-land. Certainly, with regard to actual implementation, the approach of the land reform planner must be very broad, often based on the investigations of a team of experts comprising economists, agronomists, sociologists, legal experts and the like. Land reform is a thoroughly interdisciplinary topic and cannot be effectively studied by the techniques and approaches of one subject alone. It may well be that in the academic study of land reform the broad view of the geographer, encompassing knowledge and techniques from several fields within a regional framework, will prove the most useful approach.

The Problem of Definition

Land reform has come to be a term of a bewildering variety of interpretations. In some cases 'land reform' and 'agrarian reform' are used as straight alternatives; in other cases careful distinctions are drawn. From a purely technical standpoint, almost any programme that leads to change, presumably for the better, in the manner in which land is held or used, might be described as land reform. More precisely and, from the standpoint of this book, more importantly, the different meanings and definitions do appear to have two things in common: land reform is invariably a more or less direct, publicly controlled change in the existing character of land ownership, and it normally attempts a diffusion of wealth, income or productive capacity.⁸

In English, at least, the two alternative terms do have some historical meaning. Land reform, the traditional term, always meant the redistribution of property in land for the benefit of landless workers, tenants and small farmers. But experience of early reforms, in Haiti, Russia and the Philippines for example, showed that land redistribution pure and simple often led to drastic falls in production. The importance was realised of complementary measures such as education, agricultural credit, technical assistance, capital investment in infrastructural works, co-operatives, research and improved methods of processing and marketing. The definition of land reform widened so that it became not so much a concept but more the conception of a policy, and with this broad approach the use of the term 'agrarian reform' came into vogue. Although 'land reform' as a term possibly carries more direct impact, the use of the term reforma agraria in Spanish, which language—owing to the continuing debate on agrarian reform in Latin America—accounts for a good proportion of 'reform' literature, has done much to cement the latter term's popularity.

By 'land reform', then, is specifically meant land tenure reform. Land tenure reform is of two main types: land redistribution, which involves the breaking up or combining of existing holdings and leads to a change in scale of ownership; and tenancy reform, which effects improvements in tenancy contracts, with no change in the distribution of ownership. Other forms of land reform are the converting of tenants into owners of previously rented land, and when plots are traded between farmers to consolidate otherwise fragmented holdings. The crucial issue is land redistribution; large-scale programmes of which represent a forceful type of public action designed directly to reduce the political, social and economic power of established landowners. As Warriner explains, this process consists of four stages: expropriation, compensation, exemption and redistribution.⁹ Around this 'core' of true land reform lie the more peripheral reforms of the agrarian structure which encounter much less conflict and are therefore manageable by less authoritative governments. In this way Barlowe¹⁰ has separated types of reform into four groups according to their severity. Firstly come mild reforms involving laws governing landlord-tenant relationships, land settlement and land development programmes, agricultural credit facilities and voluntary land consolidation schemes. In making use of such mild measures many countries have prevented their land problems from becoming serious, but these measures are of limited value if offered as a palliative when the real need is for thorough-going land reform. Stronger measures involve 'public controls short of expropriation' and include rent reductions and mandatory consolidation programmes. Thirdly come expropriation and distribution in family plots. This represents a more courageous type of governmental action and often follows, or is designed to prevent, a revolution. Finally there are collectivisation schemes such as those carried out in Russia, China and Cuba. The strength of public action required makes this the most extreme type of land reform.

The Need for Land Reform

Most land reforms occur in situations where great disparities in wealth, income and power exist in agriculture. Proposals for land reform assume that such inequalities are handicaps to progress, and indeed there is some evidence to indicate that extreme inequality acts as a bottleneck to development by depriving both the very rich and the very poor of any real incentive to work for higher productivity. Because there are great inequalities in many underdeveloped countries, because there are many influences tending to make such inequalities cumulative and because the forces opposed to changing this situation are firmly entrenched, there are strong arguments for an egalitarian emphasis as a rough guide to reform policy. Stated in this way, land reform can both have a basic function of providing some measure of social justice, and act to remove barriers to economic development.

Pronounced inequality in the distribution of landownership can come about in a number of ways. The process of economic development itself tends to lead to cumulative concentration of resources, geographically, sectorally and socially, and land is no exception to this general rule. Many countries have witnessed situations whereby large grants of land were made to certain individuals or to organisations such as the church or commercial companies, in return for military service, in order to develop commercial agriculture, in order to foster colonialism, or perhaps as plain gifts. The most important process has been the development of a feudal or quasi-feudal system, most simply characterised by a two-class society and the subjugation of the peasants to the landlords.

The latifundian system, with large estates worked by semiserf peons, has been a feature common to many underdeveloped areas, especially in Latin America, parts of southern Europe and the Middle East. The most obvious manifestations of this system are the high degree of concentration of landownership in the hands of a few, a large proportion of landless labourers amongst the rural population and insecure tenancy arrangements. In Latin American countries that have not experienced major land reforms, generally about 3-4 per cent of the landowners own 60-80 per cent of the agricultural land. South Asian countries also show substantial degrees of ownership concentration, but ownership is commonly decentralised through tenancy and sharecropping. Comparable figures do not exist for sub-Saharan Africa, and they would have little meaning anyway within the tribal ownership pattern. The most pronounced individual cases of skewed landownership situations come from South America. In pre-reform Chile 4-4 per cent of the landowners monopolised 85 per cent of total farmland. In Brazil over three-quarters of the agricultural population are landless, and 4-5 per cent of the landowners share between them 81 per cent of the farmland. Even in southern Italy before the 1950 reform 3 per cent of the landowners possessed 60 per cent of the land, and there were over two million braccianti (landless labourers). In countries such as these, and there are many of them, such is the domination of the landlords and so strong is their monopoly control over land and the supply of capital in agriculture that the possibilities for self-improvement on the part of the peasants are virtually nil. In Egypt, for example, where before the reform 5-8 per cent of the owners claimed 65 per cent of the agricultural land, the capital required to purchase 2 hectares—the size of a typical farm plot— was equivalent in 1947 to an agricultural labourer's wages for sixty years.¹¹

In Asia large landholdings have not for the most part been operated as centrally managed farms, but rented out in smallholdings, usually through intermediaries, to cultivators who paid high rents and had very little security. In India much land was leased through the zamindars, who did almost nothing in return for the fees they received. Before legislation the most common rate of rent was 50 per cent of the gross produce, up to 75 per cent in some cases, the tenant having to bear almost all the costs of cultivation. In Japan 'the landlord was an exalted being.... He did not deal with his tenants directly, but through a three-tiered chain of control.'¹² Such outdated and unjust systems of tenancy prevent the adoption of improved production methods and make it practically impossible for the tenant to obtain a better standard of living since, as in the latifundian situation, there is hardly any margin for savings and little incentive for additional effort.

The third type of landownership structure to which land reformers' attention is drawn is the plantation. The plantation estate, common in all three underdeveloped continents, may be run by a company or an individual (either way, often of foreign origin); as a large firm in the economic sense it is capital intensive and centrally managed, with wage labour, often only seasonally employed. Production is frequently for export only, and consists of a single crop such as coffee, sugar or rubber. The main economic (as opposed to political) arguments for land reform in plantation areas are that much labour employment is seasonal, causing great unemployment for part of the year, and that over-specialisation on an expor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Maps and Diagrams
• Preface
• PART 1 : LAND REFORM: A GENERAL OVERVIEW
• PART 2: LAND REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
• PART 3: LAND REFORM IN ASIA
• PART 4: LAND REFORM IN AFRICA
• PART 5: LAND REFORM IN THE MIDDLE EAST
• Index