Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 264

Formalization of inequality occurs when in agrarian societies marked by
socio-economic inequality and lopsided power relations, an apolitical, ahistorical,
gender-blind, ethnic-blind and class-blind “formalization” of land rights campaign is
carried out. Formalizing land rights of legal claimants in settings marked by high degree
of inequality is likely to cement land claims by the non-poor, mostly elite, claimants. In
such cases, formalization policies have only formalized inequality and institutionalized
historical injustice. Many private land-titling programs carried out by former colonial
powers thus dispossessed the local population and facilitated land-grabbing by coloniz-
ers. Today, some cases of technical formalization of land rights initiatives under certain
conditions may have effects similar to the earlier waves of enclosures in the context of
contemporary Africa (Nyamu Musembi 2007). In some settings marked by inequality,
carrying out market-led agrarian reform is also tantamount to formalizing inequality, as
in several actual cases in the Philippines (Borras, Carranza, and Franco 2007).
Restitution without redistribution happens when large-scale land-based wealth
and power transfers were carried out in the name of the poor, but in reality the latter
have no significant effective access to or control over land resources having transferred.
Land restitution policy is supposed to simply restore the control over land resources
of previously dispossessed people, for example, South African blacks due to apartheid
or Colombian internally displaced people due to rural violence ( la violencia ) and land
grabbing. In places where land restitution has been attempted, previously expelled peo-
ple do not automatically regain their land rights. Examples include some (post-)conflict
situations in which land restitutions were carried out via large tracts of lands or terri-
tories were awarded to communities without any process of democratizing access to
and control over these land resources and territories. One example of a particular kind,
arguably, is the way in which many of the land-restitution claims have been handled in
postapartheid South Africa that were devoid of any significant redistributive content,
where, in some cases, it became a transaction similar to “disturbance compensation”
paid to affected people; people were not given back their lands, they were being com-
pensated for their earlier displacement.
Many civil wars were partly caused by or have complicated struggles to control land
resources or territories. Therefore, almost always, peace settlements included land pol-
icies. However, seldom do redistributive reforms in land figure in the political settle-
ments, partly because forces opposed to redistributive land policies are located in all
warring factions, as in the case of the political conflict and peace-building efforts in the
Southern Philippines (Gutierrez and Borras 2004). In cases in which land was inserted
into the terms of peace settlement in recent times, the kinds of land policies adopted
were too market-oriented to guarantee actual land restitution to those who were previ-
ously displaced by civil wars for various reasons, including the fact that they are much
weaker actors in the (land) market. As a result, most of these settlements were less
effective, benefiting the elite more than the poor. We see these dynamics in the many
country cases involved in the Central American peace accords from 1996 onward, in
which land policy was indeed inserted into the peace settlement process—but was
based on “willing seller, willing buyer” land market transaction principle that is far