Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 252

needed to nominally own or control land so that they can enter into a range of contracts
with companies whether as laborers or as contracted small farmers. Indigenous peoples
need access to land to allow them to gather forest products. Pastoralists need to control
relatively extensive land for their animals (Mehta-Bhatt and Ficarelli, this volume).
Though much of the political and policy discourse centers on farmers or peas-
ants, and aggregate production, the most pressing human questions concern security.
Hunger and food insecurity in rural areas afflict many farming families whose access to
and control over land remain insecure. Poor households who do not produce food, or do
not produce enough, are vulnerable to food price spikes, which is especially true in the
case of urban working classes. However, this is the same situation for net food-buying
rural households, such as landless rural laborers and land-poor producers. Included in
this category of net food-buying households are poor peasants who have to sell most of
their farm produce to buy other subsistence needs. The quantity of food produced that
is retained for household consumption, and/or the disposable net income that can be
used to buy food and other basic subsistence needs, largely depends on existing social
relations of land property.
Among these social relations are dimensions of autonomy and capacity (Fox 1993).
In situations in which producers own the land—and let us assume that appropriate
public infrastructure support and policy environment were in place—they may have a
higher degree of autonomy and capacity to produce what they want to produce, and
do whatever they want to do with it (to consume, trade, or both) (see Nelson and Coe,
this volume). The situation is significantly different if a producer does not own the land.
Even if appropriate public infrastructure support and policy environment were in place,
they still have to pay the landlord (or other “ land brokers” in some settings where other
forms of land control other than private ownership prevail) ground rent or crop share.
Indeed, even with an appropriate support environment, land-based class differentiates
capacity and autonomy: it is the owners of the land and other well-to-do classes that
tend to benefit more from state supports than the landless laborers or sharecroppers.
In whatever situation, a plot-owning producer has inherently greater potential to deal
with food price spike: a ready and available plot of land to produce food in times of food
scarcity and price spike. This is not the case for landless and land-poor households: their
degree of autonomy is relatively lower: If their landlords want them to produce coconut
and prevent them from intercropping it with corn for consumption and to raise some
pigs, they tend to be powerless not to comply; their degree of capacity to generate food
for consumption and/or marketable surplus and disposable income is relatively con-
strained compared to households that own the land they work.
This land-food nexus has been a prominent legitimation for land reform globally: to
give security and opportunity to direct producers and prevent their exploitation by more
powerful actors and institutions (Lipton 2009). Land reform in its classical formula-
tion would address not only injustice, but also disincentives to production—improving
security of land rights could “turn sand to gold” (Herring 1983, chapter 9). Traditional
land reform assumed a peasant society—smallholders could survive as they had tradi-
tionally, so long as a secure foothold could be secured (Chappell, this volume). In the