Market-Led Agrarian Reform

Saturnino Borras Jr., Cristóbal Kay, Edward Lahiff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415464734
• eBook ISBN: 9781317990956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Three-fourths of the world's poor are rural poor. Most of the rural poor remain dependent on land-based livelihoods for their incomes and reproduction despite significant livelihood diversification in recent years. Land issue remains critical to any development discourse today. Market-led agrarian reform (MLAR) has gained prominence since the early 1990s as an alternative to state-led land reforms. This neoliberal policy is based on the inversion of what its proponents see as the features of earlier approaches, and calls for redistribution via privatized, decentralized transactions between 'willing sellers' and 'willing buyers'. Its proponents, especially those associated with the World Bank, have claimed success where the policy has been implemented, but such claims have been contested by independent scholars as well as by peasant movements who are struggling to gain access to land.

This book presents three thematic papers and six country studies. The thematic papers address issues of formalisation of property rights, gendered land rights, and neoliberal enclosure. These studies demonstrate the pervasive influence of neoliberal ideas on property rights and rural development debates, well beyond the 'core' question of land redistribution. The country cases bring together experiences from Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Philippines, South Africa and Egypt. Common findings include the success of landowners in minimising the impact of reform, and a lack of post-transfer support, translating into marginal impact on poverty.

The limitations of the market-led approach, and the implications of the studies presented here for the future of agrarian reform, are considered in the editors' introduction.

This book was a special issue of The Third World Quarterly.

Market-led Agrarian Reform: policies, performance and prospects

EDWARD LAHIFF, SATURNINO M BORRAS, JR & CRISTÓBAL KAY

There was no evidence … that effective land reforms could result from ‘market-friendly’ policies alone. Registering land titles and facilitating real estate transactions between willing sellers and willing buyers do not by themselves change power relationships in favour of the rural poor. In many situations, such policies are likely to reinforce agrarian structures by providing large landholders and speculators with additional legal protection, while leaving the bargaining power of the poor unchanged or diminished. (Solon Barraclough)¹

Market-led agrarian reform (MLAR) has gained prominence worldwide since the early 1990s as an alternative to the state-led approaches widely implemented over the course of the 20th century. This neoliberal policy framework, most actively promoted by the World Bank, is based on the inversion of what its proponents see as the key features of earlier approaches, and calls for redistribution via privatised, decentralised land transactions between ‘willing sellers’ and ‘willing buyers’.² MLAR embraces the textbook ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ model but also a range of variations that include a liberalised share tenancy – land rental market approach, the doing away with existing land-size ceiling laws, formalisation – privatisation of ‘non-private’ lands and various combinations of these policies, sequentially or simultaneously.³ MLAR programmes have been implemented in various forms in countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, with varying outcomes. Successful results are claimed in countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa and the Philippines, but this is challenged by a growing body of literature from academics and other researchers.⁴ Resistance to MLAR has come from various movements of peasant and the landless, based on several factors, including the high degree of discretion it grants to existing landowners, the targeting of a narrow range of better-off, more commercially oriented beneficiaries, and a generally slow pace of land transfer. Vociferous demands are being made by groups across the developing world for a more interventionist approach by national governments that will challenge the power of landowning classes and provide both land and developmental support to resource-poor farmers. Whether this implies a return to a more traditional, state-led approach, based on expropriation of larger holdings, or some hybrid of state- and market-based policies, remains an open question and one more likely to be resolved through political struggle than via technical debates among academics or policy advisors.

This book brings together both thematic and country case studies. A total of six country studies on MLAR experiences since the 1990s in Latin America, Asia and Africa are examined by scholars who have followed closely the MLAR processes in these countries (Brazil by Leonilde Servolo de Medeiros, Guatemala by Susana Gauster and Ryan Isakson, El Salvador by Ariane de Bremond, the Philippines by Saturnino Borras Jr, Danilo Carranza and Jennifer Franco, Egypt by Ray Bush and South Africa by Edward Lahiff). MLAR in these countries has taken variegated forms: from those closest to the textbook version (Brazil, Guatemala, Philippines) to a hybrid type (El Salvador, South Africa), and to a more generic neoliberal land policy type (Egypt). Common themes that emerge across the studies include the success of landowners in minimising the impact of reform, and a lack of post-transfer support for new farmers that translates into generally low levels of productivity and limited impact on poverty. These common features, and their implications for market-led programmes and for the future of agrarian reform more generally, are considered in more detail below.

The three thematic studies, focusing on formalisation of property rights, gender and land rights and neoliberal enclosures, demonstrate the pervasive influence of neoliberal ideas on multiple aspects of property rights and rural development debates.

Nyamu Musembi interrogates the claim that the procedural act of formalisation of property rights has a causal link with the empowerment of poor people. This is done primarily through an examination of the work of Hernando de Soto,⁵ in light of similar arguments made in earlier policy prescriptions on formalisation of land title in rural sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on Kenya. The positions advanced by de Soto and like-minded theorists linking formal land title to productivity, it is argued, tend to ignore the lessons of earlier waves of tenurial reform in sub-Saharan Africa, and therefore reproduce their shortcomings, particularly with regard to what Nyamu Musembi refers to as a gendered pattern of exclusion. An explicit link is made between debates around formalisation of property rights and the rise of market-led agrarian reform policies. MLAR, it is argued, presumes the existence of a property system that gives rigid legal protection to existing property interests and leaves little room to facilitate the acquisition of property interests by a wider cross-section of society. Both MLAR and de Soto’s prescriptions of formalisation of title as a tool for empowerment of the poor gloss over the unequal power relations that are behind demands for property rights reform, thus side-stepping the question of substantive redistribution.

In a comprehensive review of the debate around liberalisation and women’s access to land, Razavi argues that the shift from a household model of land rights to an individual model in recent years has tended to obscure the highly unequal power of women and men within households, and wider societies, and their divergence even within the same household. While the principle of gender equality in access to resources, including land, has been endorsed by a diverse range of policy actors, various tensions and ambiguities have emerged, including questions about the market as a vehicle for women’s inclusion. There are also, Razavi argues, troubling implications from a gender perspective in the current endorsement of ‘customary’ systems of land tenure and decentralisation of land management by a wide range of international development agencies, which can play into the hands of powerful interest groups hostile to women’s rights.

A further critique of MLAR is provided by Akram-Lodhi, who focuses on the socially embedded character of both land and markets. Using an agrarian political economy approach, Akram-Lodhi argues that MLAR is premised on two faulty assumptions: that land is solely an economic resource and that markets are institutions in which participants are equal. It is suggested that agrarian political economy offers an understanding of the processes surrounding land transfers that is predicated on the socially embedded character of such transfers, especially through the concept of enclosure. Neoliberal re-enclosure, Akram-Lodhi argues, is facilitating the emergence of a ‘bifurcated’ agrarian structure in contemporary developing and transition countries, in which emergent capitalist farming governed by the dictates of the market sits side-by-side with a ‘classic’ peasant subsistence-oriented agriculture sub-sector. This, in turn, is giving rise to an ongoing process of expanded commodification of both rural products and rural labour, contributing to an ongoing and significant process of de-peasantisation.

Together, these country studies and thematic papers provide a far-reaching critique of market-oriented land policies and highlight the need for alternative approaches.

Origins of MLAR and overview of recent debates

As has been widely observed, the 1990s saw the re-emergence of land and agrarian reform as a critical policy issue across much of the developing world. Various factors contributed to this, including the general failure of the World Bank/IMF-inspired structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s to deliver economic growth and expanded employment, and renewed pressure from rural social movements. The deregulation of agricultural markets and dramatic reductions in state support to farmers have had differential effects across commodity groups and types of producers, but have, in the main, been highly detrimental for peasant producers and agricultural labourers, contributing to a growing crisis of rural poverty, unemployment and landlessness.⁶ At the same time the rise of neoliberal ideology on a global scale has promoted the expansion of market relations into areas, such as land, which had hitherto remained outside the market to a greater or lesser extent, and to areas of policy, such as agrarian reform, that had long been predicated on direct state intervention.

The deteriorating social and economic conditions across much of Africa, Asia and Latin America have not gone uncontested, and the past decade has seen the emergence of new (and the revitalisation of some old) peasant movements, many of them now linked to national and international networks of anti-globalisation organisations.⁷ Growing popular opposition to neoliberalism in many countries posed the threat of a reversion to old-style agrarian reform, either on the back of popular land invasions, as in Brazil and Zimbabwe, or in the coming to power of more radical populist governments, as in Venezuela and Bolivia.

In this context of widespread and persistent rural poverty and inequality, MLAR has emerged as the latest in a long series of policy initiatives aimed at stimulating growth and employment in the agricultural sector. Combining elements of neoliberalism and what Byres calls ‘agrarian neo-populism’,⁸ MLAR advocates the redistribution of land from large to smaller owners via market transactions in order to achieve objectives of both social equity and economic efficiency—the latter through the assumption of an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity.⁹ New ‘family farmers’ are to be drawn into increasingly liberalised markets for land, commodities and agricultural services.

Various strategies, including provision of grants and loans, are recommended to enable the poor to enter the land market and to encourage landowners to sell off unwanted or under-used land (eg compensation in cash, at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Market-led Agrarian Reform: policies, performance and prospects
• 2. Land, Markets and Neoliberal Enclosure: an agrarian political economy perspective
• 3. De Soto and Land Relations in Rural Africa: breathing life into dead theories about property rights
• 4. Liberalisation and the Debates on Women’s Access to Land
• 5. Social Movements and the Experience of Market-led Agrarian Reform in Brazil
• 6. Eliminating Market Distortions, Perpetuating Rural Inequality: an evaluation of market-assisted land reform in Guatemala
• 7. The Politics of Peace and Resettlement through El Salvador’s Land Transfer Programme: caught between the state and the market
• 8. Anti-poverty or Anti-poor? The World Bank’s market-led agrarian reform experiment in the Philippines
• 9. ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s failed experiment in market-led agrarian reform
• 10. Politics, Power and Poverty: twenty years of agricultural reform and market liberalisation in Egypt
• Index