Land Reform and Poverty Reduction

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Land Reformand Poverty Reduction
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• A Haroon Akram-Lodhi
• Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The
  Netherlands

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• The presentation investigates the land policies
  of ten countries
• Armenia
• Bolivia
• Brazil
• Egypt
• Ethiopia
• Namibia
• The Philippines
• Uzbekistan
• Vietnam
• Zimbabwe
• The work was done for UNDPs Bureau of
  Development Policy
• The investigation is both comparative and
  analytical

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• In the countries, there has been
• modest but significant achievements in
  redistributive land reform in Brazil, the
  Philippines and Zimbabwe
• the establishment of peasant family farming in
  Armenia and Vietnam
• as a result of diverse strategies by state and
  civil society actors
• There has also been
• comparative stasis in Bolivia, Ethiopia and
  Namibia
• a comparative retreat from the gains of
  redistributive land reform in Egypt and
  Uzbekistan
• again as a result of diverse strategies by state
  and civil society actors

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• Four comparative themes emerge
• 1. Neo-liberal globalization
• A previous emphasis on building the home market
  has been replaced by the doctrines of comparative
  advantage, international interdependence and a
  level playing field

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• This context has shaped the re-emergence of land
  reform in the 21st century
• the collapse of the Soviet Union
• the potential role of land reform in constructing
  political stability, especially in South Africa
• the need for access to land by agro-food
  transnationals and local capitalists
• the failure of neo-liberalism in developing and
  transition economies
• the lack of a supply response
• the rediscovery of the inverse relationship
• the need for private property rights
• the need to build markets

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• 2. Land and agrarian production
• Barring Armenia and Ethiopia, processes of
  neo-liberal re-enclosure of land are witnessed,
  but subject to substantial differences
• Re-enclosure reconfigures a bifurcated agrarian
  structure
• one sub-sector export oriented, more capital
  intensive, with linkages to TNCs but less
  extensive domestic forward and backward linkages
• one sub-sector more diverse domestic production,
  more labour intensive, with more extensive
  forward and backward linkages, but not homogenous

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• Three phenomena are witnessed
• expanded commodification
• to promote exports
• to promote productivity and profits
• de-agrarianization
• expanded privatization
• Thus, significant trajectories of variation
  within similar processes of agrarian
  transformation

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• 3. Agrarian accumulation
• Export-driven
• Brazil and Vietnam asymmetrical but important
  complimentary linkages between two production
  sub-sectors
• Bolivia, Egypt, Namibia, the Philippines,
  Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe significantly weaker
  linkages between two production sub-sectors
• Deepening inequality in all 10 cases
• The impact of accumulation on poverty negligible,
  with the exception of Vietnam

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• 4. Rural politics
• The transformation of everyday politics into
  collective action goes the furthest in Bolivia,
  Brazil and the Philippines, although elsewhere
  collective action does take place
• The character of the rural elite differs in these
  3 cases
• The role of the state differs in these 3 cases

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• Thus the 10 case studies demonstrate a set of
  common themes, in that neo-liberal re-enclosure
  alters rural production, affects accumulation,
  and politics
• The common themes are embedded within substantive
  diversity and differential trajectories of
  variation

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• Thus, we have a perspective on the role of
  agriculture in modern economic development that
  emerges from the comparative analysis
• transnational capital dominates the reshaping of
  world agriculture in an era of neo-liberal
  globalization
• within this, national differences still matter
• the resolution of the constraints to agrarian
  development in large developing and transition
  economies would facilitate increased global
  accumulation
• In many small developing and transition
  economies, transnational capital does not care
  about the rural economy, but there remain stark
  contradictions between local capital, the state
  and peasant classes that can only be resolved by
  developing the productive forces

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• Thus, internal and international dynamics
  interact to promote the global deepening of
  capitalist relations of production even as
  national specificsincluding the possibility of
  disarticulated developmentremain
• The development of the forces and relations of
  production are shaped by and shape each other,
  and, in this interactive process, the critical
  variable is the balance of forces, locally,
  nationally, and internationally, between capital
  and labour