The International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD +20) starts this week in Cartagena in Colombia, hosted by the Colombian government and technically supported by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The conference comes 20 years after the first ICARRD held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2006. This gave rise to the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure, an ambitious framework for land governance taken up by governments around the world.
Government delegations, civil society groups, social movements and academics will come together this week to debate what are the new challenges for land, forests, fisheries and food in today’s world? In a talk at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, I made the case that a core focus must be on land redistribution, as a route to linking agrarian reform and rural development. You can watch the 30-minute talk and the discussion that followed through the following video link.
Estimates suggest that the largest 1% of farms now occupy over 70% of the world’s agricultural land while the bottom 40% hold just 3%. This threatens the livelihoods of the 2.5 billion people who depend directly on land and it produces a global food system skewed towards a handful of commodity crops grown at scale for distant markets. I argued that, “Redistributing control of farms, farming and land ownership, as part of a wider commitment to reducing inequality at all scales, must be a major policy priority.”
Given the on-going concentration of wealth – including land – addressing inequality is a core challenge of development. This was the point also made by a leading group of economists in advance of the G20 meeting in South Africa in October. They observed that, “extreme concentrations of wealth translate into undemocratic concentrations of power, unravelling trust in our societies and polarizing our politics.” The issue of global inequality is such a threat to global prosperity, they asserted, that an international panel on inequality needs to be established parallel to the IPCC on climate.
Yet land redistribution was not even mentioned in their G20 report, despite many countries around the world having large agrarian populations. This is surprising, given the experience of other nations in achieving more equitable development on the back of land reform. The East Asian experience of industrialisation and sustained economic growth was based on land reform as an early impetus. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, for example, all benefited from land reform. In a 2017 article, The Economist, perhaps surprisingly, sung the praises of land reform as the ‘path to prosperity’. Speaking about Taiwan after 1945, it noted, “Yields on sugar and rice leapt. New markets sprang up for exotic fruits and vegetables. Household farmers dominated early exports. Crucially, income inequality shrank thanks to the new farmer-capitalists. Less spent on imports of food, more money in Taiwanese pockets, a new entrepreneurialism: farming was the start of Taiwan’s economic miracle.”
While not immediately replicable, the East Asian lessons are important, I argued in the talk. Centring land redistribution in debates about inequality and longer-term economic development is essential. The talk drew from a forthcoming edited book – Redistributive land reform: challenging inequality in the 21st century – that will be published by Bloomsbury. This includes case study chapters on Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, India, the Philippines, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Scotland.
In all these countries, land redistribution has occurred. Often in particular periods, and not always in ways that have generated major structural changes in the economy. But, despite the general view often heard that land reform is a thing of the past, there are many types of land reform that are happening, often in surprising contexts.
Drawing on the chapters from the forthcoming book, the talk made the case that:
- There have been some major redistributive land reform efforts in the last few decades, even in the midst of neoliberal policy.
- Redistribution to smallholder farms can boost productivity (the inverse relationship) and, if well supported with a wider policy of agrarian reform, can have wider economic impacts on economic growth.
- Redistribution efforts can offer alternatives to large-scale corporate agriculture, supporting local experiments in alternative food systems and revived rural areas.
Echoing the Cape Town Declaration from last October, the IPC for Food Sovereignty argues in their position paper for ICARRD+20, there is a need for governments “to move beyond voluntary commitments and adopt binding, measurable actions to ensure redistributive land reform.” The coming days in Cartegna will show whether a bold, forward-looking agenda on land inequality and redistribution can emerge.
This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland.