Beyond Land Rights.(Brief Article)

"Land reform" aims to change the structure of rural property rights in order to increase the living standards of the agrarian poor, still a very substantial portion of the population in much of Latin America, South and East Asia and Africa. The two main traditions of land reform are collectivization--typically favored by communist and socialist movements and regimes--and the creation of a smallholding peasantry (the "family farm"), usually favored by those who work for constitutional democratic government. Whether collectivization or smallholding is introduced (and there are as many variations in detail as there are efforts at reform), the goal is to improve material conditions for desperately poor peasants while reducing environmental degradation, easing population growth and slowing urbanization--all in such a manner that the party or regime bringing about the changes creates an agrarian political base of support.

With the decollectivization of Chinese agriculture between 1979 and 1983 and with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communal working of the land is today seldom advocated as land reform (although such farming practices continue in modified form in many parts of the former Soviet Union). And the argument for family farms remains contested. In an era when advances in technology mean that far fewer people can produce abundant harvests, many argue that agribusiness may provide cheaper foodstuffs for the market while releasing rural labor for other pursuits. The debate today, then, turns largely on the attractiveness and feasibility of increasing smallholdings for humanitarian and political reasons when "neoliberal" economic orthodoxy favors the greater productivity of large-scale commercial farming.

For smallholding to be successful, family farms ideally need enough land and equipment to support themselves without needing to rent out their labor or to hire the labor of others. The notion is perhaps best expressed in American history with the promise (soon abandoned) made to the former slaves, the freedmen, that their political liberty after the Civil War should be complemented by grants of "40 acres and a mule." Such thinking reflected Thomas Jefferson's conviction that the health of democracy depended on the "yeoman farmer," a "freeholder" who neither hired out his labor nor required that of others beyond his family, and who thus had an independence of action economically and socially to act politically.

Not only the Americans have had such beliefs. Poor peasants everywhere want title to the land they farm, and they will fight fiercely to obtain it and support the party or government that awards it to them. Thus, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 called for the breakup of large landed estates and their replacement with a freeholding peasantry as the political backbone of a new country. Subsequently, agrarian reform in Latin America became synonymous with "land to the tiller" programs of the type that we see being promoted today in countries like Venezuela and Brazil.

While political goals have always been a primary objective of land reform, environmental and social goals have also been ...