Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
contemporary world, that view is challenged by very powerful market forces that put
ever more land into play and changes in the challenges of agriculture generated by both
stresses and pathogens endemic to global warming (Watson, this volume).
One of the reasons that classic land reform—redistribution of land from large pri-
vate landowners to landless and land-poor peasants and laborers—was carried out in
many parts of the world, historically, was in part to address rural poverty and inequal-
ity, and the political threat of an impoverished peasantry. In places where it was car-
ried out radically and successfully, we have witnessed its positive correlation with the
state's ability to feed the local population and significant degree of social improve-
ment in the lives and livelihoods of the rural poor: China, South Korea, Vietnam, and
Kerala, as some of the examples (Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz 2003; Herring 1983). That
land reform is correlated with improvement in the degree of autonomy and capac-
ity of rural poor producers to produce and secure means of subsistence and liveli-
hoods is a likely—but not automatic—scenario. The original Bolivian and Ethiopian
land reforms are some of the older examples in which extensive land reforms did not
translate to significant improvements in the lives and livelihoods of the rural poor
(Kay and Urioste 2007). Moreover, land reform contributes to the broader process of
national development (seen from conventional industrial-, urban-oriented develop-
ment), as in the context of China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan (Putzel 1992). But
again, this is not an automatic relationship, as shown in the Latin American experi-
ence (Kay 2001), and more recently, in the post-1988 land-redistribution experience
in the Philippines (Borras 2007). For land reform to have a positive connection with
the rural poor people's degree of autonomy and capacity to feed themselves, improve
their well-being, and contribute to national development more broadly depends on a
host of factors, including the infrastructure support for small-scale farmers and a pol-
icy environment friendly to newly created small-scale farmers. In the end, however,
it seems almost impossible to find justice in situations in which those who produce
the food cannot avoid hunger and insecurity (see Korthals, this volume). Land policy
addresses this burning issue.
New Contexts of Pro-Poor Land
Policy: The Global Land Rush
Land reform is no longer a dominant policy perspective globally, but the fundamental
questions underlying land policy that have always confronted societies remain: What
food is to be produced? Where? How? By whom? How is food to be distributed in a con-
text of insecurity of price regimes and supply? This is the set of questions accentuated by
the contemporary global land rush (Thaler, this volume). Answers have overlapped—
not accidentally—with the questions of social structure and political power: Who con-
trols and uses what land and for what purposes?
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search