Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 265

from a social-justice-oriented concept of land restitution (Gauster and Isakson 2007, De
Bremond 2007).
Finally, there is also a trajectory that can be termed counter-reform . The conventional
use of resettling potential and actual land claimants to empty public lands may, under
certain conditions, have potential for redistribution, although historically resettle-
ment has negatively affected preexisting settlements of local populations (Scott 1998,
69). However, where such a resettlement policy is done precisely to avoid and under-
mine political agitation for redistributive reforms in the larger agrarian society, then, in
effect, it constitutes a counter-reform. Feder (1970) once called the policy of land reform
in public lands “counter-reform” (see also Thiesenhusen 1971, 210; Tai 1974, 234). The
counter-reform in this context is still practiced in some places today, such as in Brazil.
João Pedro Stedile (2007, 203-204), leader of the Movement of the Landless Workers
(MST), explains that in recent years under the Lula administration the government set-
tled 380,000 families, but that 64 percent of these families were sent to the Amazon,
which avoided any expropriation of private land owners. “The families are now com-
pletely out of the class struggle . . . Our people are stranded in the Amazon, lost in a hos-
tile environment. Not even a small market for their produce is available there.”
(Re)concentration
The fourth type is (re)concentration . The defining character of this type is that, although
land-based wealth and power transfers do occur, access to and control over the land
resource actually gets (re)concentrated in the hands of the non-poor: private landed
classes, corporate entities, state or other elite community groups. This kind of change
can occur in private or public lands. The organization of control over land resources
can be through individual, corporate, state, or community group institutional arrange-
ments in property rights. The transfer may involve full land ownership or not. Different
variations are possible, but the bottom line is the same: the recipients of land-based
wealth and power transfers are landed classes and other non-poor entities or the state.
For example, White commercial farms transferred to emerging elite entrepreneurs from
previously (racially) disadvantaged groups, such as those in Southern Africa, qualify to
be in the broad category of “(re)concentration.” There are at least two broad trajectories
within the (re)concentration category.
First, reverse redistribution occurs when previously redistributed land-based wealth
and power (from the landed classes or from the state to the working poor) was later
redistributed back again to the landed classes, other elites, or the state. This kind of rever-
sal was seen in Chile after the 1973 coup by Pinochet, who returned a significant por-
tion of land redistributed by the Allende government to its previous owners and other
elite entities Arguably, many of the (peri-urban) land conflicts in China today exem-
plify this type: landholdings expropriated from landlords and redistributed in the 1950s
were later collectivized; then, years later the land would be de-collectivized through a
household-responsibility scheme. Since the 1980s, many of these became the object of