Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
large private landholdings, but the vast nonprivate lands, many of which are perceived
to be underutilized and are under various forms of occupancy by a variety of people,
often with rights poorly institutionalized in formal state practice. A more inclusive and
relevant position in the current context is a comprehsive pro-poor land policy, along the
lines developed earlier.
There are two ways in which a pro-poor land policy—conceptually and politically—
has relevance to the land-food-poverty nexus today. The narrow conventional mean-
ing of land reform—framed within the redistribution of large private landholdings to
landless and land-poor rural poor—may be situationally relevant, but needs expan-
sion in order to address the range of issues that connect land and hunger. We need
to recast policies addressing land-based social relations by redistributing land-based
wealth and power regardless of the preexisting land-property-rights regime, on both
private and public lands. This is easily done conceptually—but difficult politically.
The other option is to move beyond traditional land reform to include policies such
as restitution, forest management programs, leasehold reform, water rights reform,
policies on “peasant land reserves,” price policies and terms of trade, etc. This is easy
conceptually and politically feasible. The concept of redistributive land policy is also
to be embedded, analytically and politically, within emerging contemporary (re)dis-
tributive social policies that are gaining traction worldwide, moving beyond the land
to address the needs of the land poor. The land-food nexus need not be determinative
of life chances. One specific example is the rise of state-sponsored conditional cash
transfer schemes that improve food security for the poor, such as India's MGNREGA
(Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) and Brazil's Bolsa
Familia—whether seen as a substitute for or a complement to conventional land-ori-
ented policies.3
Notes
1. This section draws on Borras and Franco (2010).
2. We just have to think of land conflicts in Central and Northern Highlands as well as low-
land agricultural farms in Vietnam (Kerkvliet 2006), Indonesia (Tsing 2002, Li 1996,
Peluso 1992), Bolivia (Kay and Urioste 2007) and China that all involve public—not
private—lands.
3. See, for example, the chapters in this volume by Sahn, Gaiha et  al., and Kotwal and
Ramaswami.
References
Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia . Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, Henry, 2002. “Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View.” Journal of Agrarian Change
2(4):433-463.
Bernstein, H. 2010. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change , Halifax: Fernwood.
 
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