When land reform turns into the burning issue

Jonathan Power, Stockholm

Fifteen white Zimbabwean farmers, their land taken from them in one of the most badly conceived land reform programs ever enacted, announced recently that they have been invited to start farming in Nigeria where land is both plentiful and, by tradition, reasonably fairly distributed.

Land reform has been given a bad name in Zimbabwe where the most modern and productive farmers have been summarily stripped of their titles for no other reason than the color of their skin.

In Venezuela, likewise, a typical Latin American country still mired in its feudal division of land, its mercurial president, Hugo Chavez, is stirring the issue of land seizures, a policy that is more beholden to his short term electoral needs than to any long term thought-out policy for diminishing rural poverty and inequality.

Yet careful land reform is an absolute must in many countries -- in Nepal where a dangerous Maoist insurgency is fueled in part by years of neglect of the inequalities of the countryside; in South Africa where a decade of black political power has not done much about the 85 percent of the farmland being owned by a few thousand white farmers; and in India where successful land reform in the Communist-ruled states of West Bengal and Kerala has highlighted what needs to be done in the rest of the country if poverty is ever to be conquered and Maoist-inspired insurgencies in a number of states quelled, as they were in West Bengal.

We can identify three causes of revolutionary violence in those countries which land division is particularly unequal. The first is when expectations are unchanged but the actuality worsens -- as in Ethiopia in the 1970s when drought caused severe crop failures but landlords still insisted on their rents. This led to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie.

The second is when expectations and actuality remain the same but the level of opposition to authority can no longer be managed by the government. The collapse of the Russian army in 1917 and the return home of the peasant soldiers, weapons in hand, was a case in point.

The third is the traditional cause: the revolution of rising expectations, which increase while the actuality remains the same. This is true for Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, parts of India and much of Latin America.

It is not poverty alone so much as it is blamable poverty that seems to serve as the trigger for violence. A large number of the most violent 20th century conflicts occurred when a substantial part of the population was blocked from earning a secure living from the land they tilled.

Land protests played a catalytic role in successful revolutions in Russia, Mexico, China, Bolivia, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. As recently as the 1980s it was the reason for wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras. Washington, alarmed by Cuban support for the Central American insurgencies, threw its weight against these peasant revolts and the land remains unfairly divided.

It is a sad tale. But not the only one. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have carried out highly successful land reforms, all of which are credited with having laid the foundations for their phenomenal economic development. Japan's in fact was carried out by the U.S. occupation administration headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Taiwan's was carried out by the right wing administration of Chiang Kai-shek who made landowners of 60 percent of the former tenants. South Korea's was pushed through by another right wing ideologue, Syngman Rhee, who made owners of 64 percent of the former tenants.

Land reform only works when it is done carefully. This means fair compensation for those bought out, so that they can invest in industrial development. It means proper follow up for the new tenants. If they have no expert counseling, no water and no improved seeds they will quickly lower productivity, as they have in Zimbabwe. But World Bank studies have shown that if small farmers are given the right resources and advice they are more productive per acre than large farmers, as they tend the land more intensively.

Quick land reform is not always possible -- as in India where the political and financial hurdles are a deterrent. But, as the doyen of land reform, Roy Prosterman of the University of Washington's Rural Development Institute, told me in an interview, it should be possible at the very least to give the landless "homestead plots" -- a fraction of a hectare sufficient for a garden, fruit trees and a few animals. This would require only 0.3 percent of India's arable land, transforming our assumptions about the affordability of land reform.

By one means or another land reform has to be done. Otherwise much of the Third World could be as turbulent this century as it was in the last.

The author is a freelance writer based in London. He can be reached by e-mail at JonatPower@aol.com