Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 262

Redistribution
The first is redistribution. The defining principle for this type is that the land-based
wealth and power are transferred from the monopoly control of either private landed
classes or the state to landless and near-landless working poor (poor peasants and rural
laborers). It changes the relative shares of groups in society. It is a “zero-sum” reform
process (Fox 1993, 10). Here, redistributed wealth and power is a matter of degree,
depending on the net loss of the landed entities and on the net gain of the landless and
near-landless poor. And so, policies that expropriate lands without compensation and
distribute these to peasants are redistributive reforms. The revolutionary land reform
in China in the early 1950s is an example. Arguably lands that are expropriated can, in
turn, be appropriated by the state to create state farms to benefit the landless poor by giv-
ing them employment in these large-scale farms, as in the case of Cuba. A classic redis-
tributive land policy acquires land at slightly below the commercial market value, and
re-sells the same to peasants at slightly below the full market value. This is the more
common type of land reform, as in the case of Taiwan (Tai 1974). Arguably, the former is
more redistributive than the latter, as illustrated empirically in the cases of Chinese and
Taiwanese processes of the early 1950s, respectively (Borras 2007).
The conventional notion of redistributive land reform, that is, applied only in (rela-
tively) large private lands, is the most commonly understood example of land-based
redistributive reform. These are explained in important works such as Tuma (1965)
and Griffin et al (2002). However, we argue that there are a variety of policy expressions
beyond the conventional notion that can result in changing the relative shares of groups
in society. These include redistributive land reform, land restitution, share tenancy, or
land-tenure reform, land stewardship, indigenous land-rights recognition, labor reform,
and so on. This variety exists regardless of whether a policy is applied to a private or pub-
lic land. The key is the degree and directionality of redistributed wealth and power.
Distribution
The second type of reform is distribution . The defining character of this type of reform
is that the landless and near-landless working poor are the recipients of land-based
wealth and power. However the original source of wealth and power can either be the
state or community (or a private entity that has been fully compensated by the state).
In many settings, this type of reform would mean affirming and protecting preexisting
land access and occupancy by poor peasants whose tenures are insecure, as in many
countries in Africa (Cousins 2007). It is a “positive sum” reform process. It does not take
resources from one group in society to redistribute to another. In fact, often such a pol-
icy is passed precisely to avoid having to resort to redistributive policies (Fox 1993, 10).
For example, a piece of land that is officially categorized as public or state forest is actu-
ally an agroforest land tended and tilled by poor peasants or forest dwellers. A long-term
forest- land use-rights allocation was issued to the poor peasants or forest dwellers in