Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 266

competing land use. On many occasions, local government units have taken over such
lands from the villagers without sufficient or fair compensation to the affected commu-
nities. This process has underpinned recent escalating rural conflict and violence. In
addition to such large-scale reversals, there are also “micro” reversals involving specific
landholdings that were previously redistributed to peasants. This type of reversal can be
seen today in settings that have significant land redistribution or have had land tenure
reform in the past, such as in the Philippines (Borras 2007).
Second, perverse redistribution is a trajectory in which land-based wealth and power
are transferred from the working poor people to the landed classes, other elites, or the
state or elite community groups. This can happen under a variety of policies, including
land-reform policy, forest-land allocation or management devolution, formalization
and privatization of land rights, a variety of land-based joint venture agreements and
land lease arrangements. This kind of redistribution has occurred in many guises and in
many places historically. These include the many private land titling initiatives past and
present that were captured by elites, in which the poor lost access to and control over
land resources, as shown in the vast critical literature on the subject. A recent example
comes from the Philippines, where a market-led agrarian reform experiment, in some
instances, facilitated the formalization of land-grabbing of indigenous communities'
lands, leading to poor people losing their actual occupancy and formal claim over land
rights that were in turn given formally to elite claimants (Borras, Carranza and Franco
2007).
In sum, land policies, when implemented, have intended and unintended outcomes;
historically, there have been four broad categories of such outcomes. These four catego-
ries offer analytical signposts for observers to understand land policies in terms of their
impact on the rural poor.
Conclusion
The land-and-food nexus has been a persistent political question in human history.
Land reform—the conventional variant of it—is one policy and political device to
address the question of social justice and production through redistribution of large
estates to landless and near-landless rural poor (Tai 1974). There are other dimensions
of land reform (e.g., political democratization), but the land-food nexus tends to be a
central one. That land reform remains a critical issue today—especially in relation to the
politics of food and hunger—is beyond question (Lipton 1993; 2009). This importance
has been re-emphasized by the current global land rush.
However, to argue that land reform is a sufficient umbrella conceptual, political, and
policy framework to tackle the land-food nexus in the context of current dynamics is
incomplete. The advocacy of La Vía Campesina for land reform in confronting the cur-
rent situation of global land rush, for example, is only partly correct, and is largely mis-
placed. Much of the lands targeted in contemporary global enclosure are not relatively