Anti-Poverty Land Reform Issues Never Die

Collected essays on development economics in practice

M. Riad El-Ghonemy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415497015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134004584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

What can we do to unlock the unrealised potential of the hundreds of millions of rural poor and landless workers?

The ever-topical central theme in this collection of essays is the mixed role of government and the institutionally regulated market in tackling rural poverty and land distribution inequality. Drawing on over half a century of M. Riad El-Ghonemy's academic and field experience in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South East Asia, this is a comprehensive record of the late-twentieth century study of and struggle against rural inequality, seen through the eyes of one of its foremost observers.

Containing a balance of in-depth field studies and El-Ghonemy's personal observations from 1952 onwards, this volume provides the basis for discussion and debate on a range of developmental issues. Foremost among these is the appropriate approach both to explain the factors underlying developing countries' rural backwardness, and to enable them to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of poverty and hunger by 2015. The compelling argument made here is that redistributive land reform, combined with non-farm intensive employment opportunities and investment in education within rural areas are necessary to tackle persistent poverty effectively.

Anti-Poverty Land Reform Issues Never Die is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students learning rural development and institutional and development economics.

M.Riad El-Ghonemy is Senior Research Associate at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford and Research Fellow at the Department of Economics, the American University in Cairo, and Emeritus Professor, Ein-Shams University, Cairo. He is the author of several publications, including The Political Economy of Rural Poverty, Routledge (1990).

Part I
Development policy issues

1
What does participation of the poor in development mean?¹

Introduction

Recently, and since the change in the perception of development in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms ‘participation’, ‘people or popular participation’ and ‘participating development’ have appeared in the centre stage of development thinking and policy choice. Yet, in addressing poverty issues, these terms have been rhetorically abused by eloquent politicians and some writers. How have these rhetorics and the partial understanding of rural poverty dynamics distorted policy design and programme evaluation? And, how can low-income developing countries follow the development path that reduces poverty as the major goal of development? To explore these possibilities is the major task of my address today. But let me first examine the nature of the change in development thinking.

Development thinking change

Following the strength of the neoclassical analytical approach during the first half of this century, the comprehensive understanding of the complex socio-political forces operating in the rural economy founded in the eighteenth century by Adam Smith has been broken up into a Newtonian narrow type of commodity and mathematical relations, excluding welfare elements of personal income distribution and such institutional arrangements as land tenure-based power structures, which are left to anthropologists and sociologists. The central rural underdevelopment issues of land concentration and marginalized rural poor were left out in the quantitative analytical reasoning.

The experience of newly independent developing countries in the post-Second World War era proved the inadequacy of this narrow approach for understanding, and tackling the problems of rural poverty and gross inequalities inherited from long colonial rules. Experience has shown that the use of a standardized criterion of economic growth or the quantitative expansion of the economy as a single development objective has increased inequalities and could not reduce poverty at a socially acceptable rate. In this narrow perception, it was stressed that solutions for rural underdevelopment problems were to be found primarily in technical change, free trade rural–urban mobility of labour and foreign aid. On this conjunction, Seers wrote:

It looks as if economic growth may not merely fail to solve social and political difficulties; certain types of growth can actually cause them … It looks like a preference for avoiding the real problems of development.²

Towards broadening the narrow analytical system

It was inevitable that the boundaries of the analytical apparatus of neoclassical economics had to be expanded and new analytical tools had to be found. This concern did not arise from intellectual curiosity. Instead, it was based on sufficient evidence accumulated from the interaction with different settings in newly independent developing countries. Economists and other social scientists from academic institutions, international organizations like Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) were called upon by many of these countries’ governments to examine their development problems in order to furnish advice on the formulation and implementation of rural development programmes, and to train their national personnel in these fields. Many of us have been engaged in this work. I was, myself, substantially involved during the 1950s and 1960s with the anti-poverty rural development programmes of Egypt, Ecuador, Iraq and Paraguay and for a short time in Cuba.

From their encounter with poverty, landlessness, small farmers’ institutional constraints, development economists fostered active roles for government intervention and purposeful planning for development and targeting public expenditure and special programmes, including ‘people participation’ to develop the potential productive capacity of the various categories of the poor through sharing in the development process.

From his careful review of 25 years’ experience in 26 developing countries during the period 1950–75, David Morowitz (1977: 41) says:

The historical experience suggests that it simply may not be possible to grow first and redistribute later, because the structure of growth may largely fix the pattern of distribution, at least until much higher levels of per capita income are approached. That is to say, if greater equality of income is to be an objective in the medium term, it may be necessary to tackle it as a first priority by land reform, mass education … rather than leaving it until after growth has taken place.

Different perceptions of participatory development

I began my presentation with the recent wide use of the term participation in different senses that has led to its rhetorical misuse and distortion of rural development policy choice. I shall attempt to clarify this tough issue, which I view as a process of the redistribution of economic and decision-making power by the poor sharing in asset ownership, and influencing policy choice and programming, through their own organizations. The aim is to achieve their productive potential and equitable rural development.

Sharing in economic power

It is assumed that the rural poor have latent skills and some resources that have enabled them to survive through the decades. Their low incomes or consumption comes from low productivity levels caused by their exclusion from access to productive assets (land, credit and education) as well as from their ill health and dependency on landowners, money lenders and biased local bureaucrats. In the face of land concentration in a few hands and strict rationing of agricultural credit combined with a scarcity of non-farm jobs for unskilled agricultural workers, the daily-wage worker, sharecropper and small tenant have no accessible opportunity to own or profitably lease a piece of land in their lifetime. They have no choice but to live in poverty. Empirical evidence available reveals a positive relationship between poverty alleviation and greater access to land and credit. The extent of this distribution of productive assets and poverty reduction is subject to the operational ideology of each country (capitalist market or socialist economy). This aim was succinctly articulated by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international development agencies participating in the 1979 WCARRD, affirming that ‘national progress based on growth with equity and participation requires a redistribution of economic and political power’.³

Secure access to the means of production and ownership of land in particular is a source of power because of a fundamental change in the rural poor conditions from dependency or subordination to freedom and self-reliance. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘dependency’ means: ‘inability to do without someone; subordination to another person for maintenance (or survival); and dependence on another person for power’. Thus, participation in this sense is based on increased productive assets and enhanced productivity brought forth by self-reliance that contributes to national output growth. But what matters is not growth per se, because we have witnessed during the last decade how rapid growth in agricultural productivity achieved by technology alone (the intensive use of high-yielding varieties of grain) under the so-called Green Revolution did not benefit the majority of the poor (small marginal cultivators and landless workers) in South Asia, who found themselves competing – from a disadvantaged position – for credit and irrigation facilities with big landowners. Likewise, the agro-business multinationals which brought substantial capital and technology to rural areas have further marginalized the poor peasants, displaced labour and enhanced the monopoly power of landlords.⁴

The importance of injecting capital and technology into traditional agriculture for economic growth cannot be underestimated, but the assumption that they would benefit all rural people proved erroneous and should be dismissed. The realities of worsening land distribution and poverty conditions in 1980 are documented in FAO (1982). The distressing facts about rural poverty in developing countries revealed that: more than half of the rural population of 31 developing countries were living in absolute poverty and as high as over 80 per cent in seven African countries; 48 developing countries were unable to meet the minimum food requirement; 938 million are wage-dependent landless and near landless, while the land concentration index increased to over 0.6 in 18 countries; the adult illiteracy rate was 65 per cent; and life expectancy at birth averaged 45–49 years.⁵

Apart from distributive land reform to secure access to land for achieving the benefits of anti-poverty participatory development, credit-based participatory activities has also been followed in several countries to enhance the productive potential of small farmers and landless farm workers. Examples of the former are Pakistan’s and Nepal’s schemes for small farmers’ credit supply without collateral and the Bangladesh programme of both the Grameen Bank and the Ministry of Rural Development designed to benefit landless workers who were organized in harmonious and informal groups. Available evidence indicates that these rural poor are now able to receive adequate credit (about US$20–50 each), which helped to unleash their potential productivity and enable them to take advantage of available market opportunities in order to increase their annual income and employment opportunities.⁶

Influencing policy-making through the poor’s own organizations

The fundamental provision of greater access to land and credit is created by outside initiatives (government, university scholars and aid-giving foreign agencies). I am afraid that its major aim to free the beneficiaries from dependence and subordination may be jeopardized by what I have experienced since 1980 during my five years of being the FAO Chief of the Rural Development Service, which includes people-participation activities. I have observed a tendency, by foreign aid-giving agencies, towards excessive involvement and even bullying pressure to adopt their own perceptions of participatory rural development. I trust that many of you would agree with me that this tough subject of participation, whether a means or an end to equitable rural development, requires a response to carefully defined grassroots needs, combined with an understanding of the cultural value of the rural poor. It is clear as crystal that this process of participation, with its coherent elements, cannot be imposed or rushed to yield quick results in the diverse circumstances of poor rural communities.

The provision of credit to poor farm people that has been a common participatory instrument has also influenced the banking system in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Likewise, provincial and national agrarian reform cooperative associations in Egypt and the Peasant Association in rural Ethiopia through a system of layers of representation have voiced the needs of small farmers, and have acted as monitoring bodies over local government bureaucracy to see that services are delivered to the intended beneficiaries. Many of these institutional organizations have also reduced the financial burden on governments by collecting voluntary contributions from rural people who proved to be willing to pay for what they had chosen and met their own priorities.

Peasant associations formed by local movements in Brazil and India took the initiative to provide the oppressed landless workers with unique opportunities to secure land ownership and, in turn, have influenced central government’s policy choices. For instance, in northern Brazil, in the Pernambuco district, share-croppers and landless workers who resisted high rents and demanded higher wages were organized in a society (Ligas Camponenas) – that was supported by the Catholic Church – and succeeded in taking over 600 ha. of a large sugar-cane estate in 1961. Consequently, they were able to attain food security by growing cassava, maize, sweet potatoes and yams. After a period of local tension, this movement was recognized by the government, which issued the Rural Labour Statute in 1963. SUPRA, a new government organization, was set up to regulate the allocation of land and its use where land seizures had taken place.⁷

Another widely publicised example of participatory action is the ‘Bhoomi Sena’ m...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Development Economics
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Development policy issues
• Part II Country- and region-specific essays
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index