Land Reform

Land reform is usually understood as a narrow section of more comprehensive agrarian reform that involves not only granting land titles and changing the land property structure but also credit, research, and training. Land concentration and lack of investment are the main issues usually tackled by land reform policies. However, the opposite aim, of promoting land concentration and attracting investment, is also an excuse for what some prefer to call counter-reform. However, land reform has not always been successful in achieving these broad goals. From Ancient Egypt and Rome through medieval Europe and Asia to current Latin America and Africa, land reform has always been at the heart of the development policy debate. This debate has been intensified by the contradictions between different development views of urban and rural populations and between those who profit with these reforms and those who afford their costs.

Agrarian reform in early-20th-century Mexico not only transformed its national land property structures but also influenced politics, law, and economics worldwide. The emergence of land issues in the Mexican Revolution contributed to developing the idea of a social function for property—an issue that was later developed by the Chilean experience [Page 281]under Salvador Allende and other nationalist regimes. The 1917 Queretaro Mexican constitution introduced a number of social rights, derived from the agrarian reform carried out, that also influenced law and politics on a broader perspective. The constitution effectively fractured land holdings into small land property, abolished monopoly, and established labor rights.

In 1960s Latin America, agrarian reform sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Kennedy administration aimed to reform the structure of land property to avoid the spread of the Cuban revolution in the region. In some Latin American countries, left-wing nationalist de facto governments aimed to steer the development reform through land reform. However, the reforms were resisted and boycotted and only reached a small percentage of agricultural land.

Since the 1990s, following a different approach, land reform has been proposed by World Bank policies that promote land reform, usually fostering modernization, mechanization, agribusiness, and individual property as adequate policies for the vast areas of communal land still held by indigenous peoples and peasants in Latin America, for example.

In this case, land reform is part of a more general drive for modernization and development through an export-led development strategy that also aims to develop a land market and a labor force market. The mindset of these reforms is that individual property is a more efficient use of land than common property, that private investors are more efficient than small landholders, and that the world market can only be fed by modern agribusiness with high technology.

This is not necessarily true in multicultural societies such as Latin America. For instance, in the Upper Tambopata River, near the border between Peru and Bolivia, organic coffee is produced in an isolated rural area of money-lacking peasants who, for that very same reason, do not use expensive chemical nutrients and pesticides, thus maintaining organic production of coffee. This coffee is now sold to world-market coffee traders such as Starbucks, with exports doubling many times since 2003. Thus, not only is modernization possible for large investment, but there is also space for small land proprietors—whether indigenous peoples or not—and also for other types of landholders, such as communal landholders. The world market demands agricultural production from these areas but also nature's products, gathered from the rivers, lakes, forests, grasslands, glaciers, and other areas where people in subsistence economies supply the flow line to the cities and ports.

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