Land reform

Land reform (also agrarian reform, though that can have a broader meaning) is an often-controversial type of government-initiated or government-backed real estate property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. The term most often refers to transfer from ownership by a relatively small number of wealthy (or noble) owners with extensive land holdings (e.g. plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual or collective ownership by those who work the land. Such transfer of ownership may be with or without consent or compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land. The land value tax advocated by Georgists is a moderate, market-based version of land reform.

This definition is somewhat complicated by the issue of state-owned collective farms. In various times and places, land reform has encompassed the transfer of land from ownership — even peasant ownership in smallholdings — to government-owned collective farms; it has also, in other times and places, referred to the exact opposite, division of government-owned collective farms into smallholdings.

Land ownership and tenure

See main article Land ownership and tenure.

The variety of land reform derives from the variety of land ownership and tenure. Among the possibilities are:

• Traditional land tenure, as in the indigenous nations or tribes of North America in the Pre-Columbian era.
• Feudal land ownership, through fiefdoms
• Life estate, interest in real property that ends at death.
• Fee tail, hereditary, non-transferable ownership of real property.
• Fee simple. Under common law, this is the most complete ownership interest one can have in real property.
• Leasehold or rental
• Rights to use a commons
• Sharecropping
• Easements

In addition, there is paid agricultural labor — under which someone works the land in exchange for money, payment in kind, or some combination of the two — and various forms of collective ownership. The latter typically takes the form of membership in a cooperative, or shares in a corporation, which owns the land (typically by fee simple or its equivalent, but possibly under other arrangements). There are also various hybrids: in many communist states, government ownership of most agricultural land has combined in various ways with tenure for farming collectives.

Additionally there are, and have been, well-defined systems where neither land nor the houses people live in are their personal property (Statare, as defined in Scandinavia).

The peasants or rural agricultural workers who are usually the intended primary beneficiaries of a land reform may be, prior to the reform, members of failing collectives, owners of inadequate small plots of land, paid laborers, sharecroppers, serfs, even slaves or effectively enslaved by debt bondage.

Arguments for and against land reform

Land reform policies are generally advocated as an effort to eradicate food insecurity and rural poverty, often with Utilitarian (eg., "the greatest good for the greatest number"), philosophical or religious arguments (see Jubilee), a right to dignity, or a simple belief that justice requires a policy of "land to the tiller". However, many of these arguments conflict with prevailing notions of property rights in most societies and states. Implementations of land reform generally raise questions about how the members of the society view the individual's rights and the role of government.

These questions include:

• Is private property of any sort legitimate?
• If so, is land ownership legitimate?
• If so, are historic property rights in this particular state and society legitimate?
• Even if property rights are legitimate, do they protect absolutely against expropriation, or do they merely entitle the property owner to partial or complete compensation?
• How should property rights be weighed against rights to life and liberty?
• Who should adjudicate land ownership disputes?
• At what level of government is common land owned?
• What constitutes fair land reform?
• What are the internal and external political effets of the land reform?

Concern over the value of land reform is based upon the following:

• Lack of track record to support land reform outcome; for example, in Zimbabwe, an aggressive land reform plan has led to a collapse of the economy and 45 percent malnutrition.
• Question of experience and competence of those recieving land to be productive.
• Equity issues of displacing persons who have sometimes worked hard in previous farming of the land
• Question of competence of governmental entities to make decisions regarding agricultural productivity
• Question of enmiring a country in vast legal disputes from arbitrary property distribution
• Demotivation of any property owners to invest in land, which ultimately can be seized

Opposing "royal libertarian" (but not geolibertarian) ethical arguments to government-directed "land reform" maintain it is just a euphemism for theft, and argue that stealing is still stealing regardless of what any group of non-owners (of the property in question) may succeed in obtaining via government intermediary, and that such policies consequently cannot ever be just. They state that alleged "willing seller, willing buyer" programs also invariably involve governments buying land with tax-money (which may be disproportionately collected from the land-owners the land of whom are concerned in the planned reform), and sometimes laws granting government first right to buy land for sale (diminishing the market-value of the land by eliminating competing buyers), and so an element of coercion exists despite the "willing" label.

The opposition for a land reform may also be based on other ideologies than modern-day liberalism. In countries where there has traditionally been no private land ownership (e.g. Russia in 19th century) the opposition for reforms enabling the creation of private farms may use nationalistic arguments, proposing that the private farms are inconsistent with the national culture. In countries where the established church was an important land owner, theological arguments have been used in the debate on privatization or nationalization of that land (e.g. 16th century Sweden). The right to ownership of the land, and sometimes, the persons residing on that land, has also been argued on the theory of right of conquest, implying that the original ownership was transferred to the land-owning class's ancestors in a just war. The ownership can also be argued on the ground of god-given right, implying that it is some deity that has given the land to its owners.

For the proponents of the reform, the rights of the individuals for whose good the reform is supposed to work, overcome the property rights of the land owners. Usually their philosophical background differs significantly from the viewpoints outlined above, spanning from Marxism to religious ideologies. What is common for them, is that they see the rights or duties advocated as more important than right to own real estate.

See also property redistribution.

Land reform efforts

Agrarian land reform has been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history — see, for example, the history of the Semproninan Law or Lex Sempronia agraria proposed by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and passed by the Roman Senate (133 BC), which led to the social and political wars that ended the Roman Republic.

A historically important source of pressure for land reform has been the accumulation of significant properties by tax-exempt individuals or entities. In the Christian world, this has frequently been true of churches and monastaries. In the Moslem world, land reforms such as that organized in Spain by al-Hurr in 718 have transferred property from Muslims to Christians, who were taxable.

In the modern world and in the aftermath of colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, land reform has occurred around the world, from the Mexican Revolution (1917; the revolution began in 1910) to Communist China to Bolivia (1952, 2006) to Zimbabwe and Namibia. Land reform has been especially popular as part of decolonization struggles in Africa and the Arab world, where it was part of the program for African socialism and Arab socialism. Cuba has seen one of the most complete agrarian reforms in Latin America. Land reform was an important step in achieving economic development in many Third World countries since the post-World War II period, especially in the East Asian Tigers and "Tiger Cubs" nations such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Malaysia.

Since mainland China's economic reforms led by Deng Xiaoping land reforms have also played a key role in the development of the People's Republic of China, with the re-emergence of big landowners as well as landless peasants.

Latin America

• Mexico: a certain degree of land reform was introduced, albeit unevenly, as part of the Mexican Revolution. Emiliano Zapata was strongly identified with land reform, as are the present-day (as of 2006) Zapatista Army of National Liberation. See Mexican Agrarian Land Reform.
• Brazil: In the 1930s, Getúlio Vargas reneged on a promised land reform. Strong campaign including direct action by the Landless Workers' Movement throughout the 1990s. Current efforts under Lula da Silva, Brazil's first elected leftwing president, inaugurated January 1, 2003
• Guatemala: land reform occurred during the "Ten Years of Spring", 1944–1954 under the governments of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz.
• Bolivia: The revolution of 1952 was followed by a land reform law, but in 1970 only 45% of peasant families had received title to land, although more land reform projects continued in the 1970s and 1980s. Bolivian president Evo Morales restarted land reform when he took office in 2006.
• Peru: land reform in the 1950s largely eliminated a centuries-old system of debt peonage. Further land reform occurred after the 1968 coup by left-wing colonel Juan Velasco Alvarado, and again as part of a counterterrorism effort against the Shining Path roughly 1988–1995, led by Hernando de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy during the early years of the government of Alberto Fujimori, before the latter's auto-coup.
• Cuba: Land reform was among the chief planks of the revolutionary platform of 1959. Almost all large holdings were seized by the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA), which dealt with all areas of agricultural policy. A ceiling of 166 acres (67 hectares) was established, and tenants were given full ownership rights.
• Chile: Attempts at land reform began under the government of Jorge Alessandri in 1960, were accelerated during the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970), and reached its climax during the 1970-1973 presidency of Salvador Allende. Farms of more than 198 acres (80 hectares) were expropriated. After the 1973 coup the process was halted, and up to a point reversed by the market forces.
• Colombia: Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934-1938) passed the Law 200 of 1936, which allowed for the expropriation of private properties, in order to promote "social interest". Later attempts declined, until the National Front presidencies of Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958-1962) and Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-1970), which respectively created the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA) and further developed land entitlement. In 1968 and 1969 alone, the INCORA issued more than 60,000 land titles to farmers and workers. Despite this, the process was then halted and the situation began to reverse itself, as the subsequent violent actions of drug lords, paramilitaries, guerrillas and opportunistic large landowners severely contributed to a renewed concentration of land and to the displacement of small landowners. In the early 21st century, tentative government plans to use the land legally expropriated from drug lords and/or the properties given back by demobilized paramilitary groups have not caused much practical improvement yet.
• Venezuela: Hugo Chávez's government enacted Plan Zamora to redistribute government and unused private land to campesinos in need.

Middle East and North Africa

Land reform is discussed in the article on Arab Socialism

• Egypt: Initially, Egyptian land reform essentially abolished the political influence of major land owners. However, land reform only resulted in the redistribution of about 15% of Egypt's land under cultivation, and by the early 1980s, the effects of land reform in Egypt drew to a halt as the population of Egypt moved away from agriculture. The Egyptian land reform laws were greatly curtailed under Anwar Sadat and eventually abolished.
• Syria (1963, largely reversed since)
• Iran: a significant land reform was part of Muhammad Reza Shah's so-called White Revolution of 1963. Almost 90% of Iranian share-croppers became land owners.
• Iraq (1970)

Europe

• Finland: In 1918, Finland fought a civil war resulting in a series of land reforms. These included the compensated transfer of lease-holdings (torppa) to the leasers and prohibition of forestry companies to acquire land. After the Second World War, Carelians evacuated from areas ceded to Russia were given land in remaining Finnish areas, taken from public and private holdings. Also the veterans of war benefited from these allotments.
• France: a major and lasting land reform took place under the Directory during the latter phases of the French Revolution.
• Estonia and Latvia: at their founding as states in 1918–1919, they expropriate the large estates of Baltic German landowners, much of which became smallholdings.
• Hungary: In 1945 every estate bigger than 142 acres was expropriated without compensation and distributed among the peasants. In the 1950s collective ownership was introduced according to the Soviet model, but after 1990 co-ops were dissolved and the land was redistributed among private smallholders.
• Ireland: after the Irish Famine, land reform became the dominant issue in Ireland, where almost all of the land was owned by the English aristocracy. The Irish Parliamentary Party campaigned for this in a largely indifferent British House of Commons. Reform began tentatively in 1870 and continued for fifty years (see also Land War).
• Poland: there have been several land reforms in Poland. The most important include Land reforms in the Second Polish Republic (1919, 1921, 1923, 1925 and 1928) and Land reform (1944) in the People's Republic of Poland.
• Romania: After failed attempts at land reform by Mihail Kogălniceanu in the years immediately after Romanian unification in 1863, a major land reform finally occurred in 1921.
• Russia
  • Imperial Russia: Stolypin reform
  • Bolshevist Russia: Decree on Land
• Scotland the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 ends the historic legacy of feudal law and creates a framework for rural or croft communities right to buy land in their area.
• Sweden, almost non-violently, arrived at regulating the length minimum of tenant farming contracts at 25 years.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Kenya: Kenyatta launched a "willing buyer-willing seller" based land reform program in the 1960s, funded by Britain, the former colonial power. In 2006 president Mwai Kibaki said it will repossess all land owned by "absentee landlords" in the coastal strip and redistribute it to squatters. . Outcome of land reform is a malnourshed percentage of the population of 32%.
• Namibia: A limited land reform has been a hallmark of the regime of Sam Nujoma; legislation passed in September 1994, with a compulsory, compensated approach.
• South Africa: "Land restitution" was one of the promises made by the African National Congress when it came to power in South Africa in 1994. Initially, land was bought from its owners (willing seller) by the government (willing buyer) and redistributed. However, as of early 2006, the ANC government announced that it will start expropriating the land, although according to the country's chief land-claims commissioner, Tozi Gwanya, unlike Zimbabwe there will be compensation to those whose land is expropriated, "but it must be a just amount, not inflated sums."
• Zimbabwe: Very controversial efforts at land reform in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe has moved steadily from a "willing seller, willing buyer" approach toward outright expropriation, often for the benefit of people close to the government. Outcome to date is 45 percent of the population malnourished.

North America

• Canada: A land reform was carried out as part of Prince Edward Island's agreement to join the Canadian confederation in the 1870s. Most of the land was owned by absentee landlords in England, and as part of the deal Canada was to buy all the land and give it to the farmers.
• United States of America: Native Americans living in several Indian reservations across the country are working to reclaim or recover their lands that were lost from Forced Fee Patenting and other Federal programs that alienated them from their legally allotted lands.
  • Native Americans living on several Indian reservations across the country are working to reclaim their lands from the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs leasing program, which leases these lands to mostly non-tribal farmers and ranchers. Many of these lands were put into the program against the will of their legal allottees and/or legal heirs who were declared "incompetent" to manage their own affairs. There exists very few records on how the classification of "competency" or "non-competency" was determined by the Competency Commissions that existed on Native American Reservations prior to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.
  • Minnesota:"The mission of the White Earth Land Recovery Project is to facilitate recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation, while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage (WELRP)."
  • Following the Civil War, the Radical Republicans attempted to put a land reform through Congress, promising "forty acres and a mule" to newly-freed blacks in the South, which was ultimately rejected by moderate elements as "socialistic". This failure left blacks without an economic base, and was one of the key contributing factors to the development of sharecropping and segregation.
  • The Dawes Act of 1887 split the Indian tribal lands into allotments held by individual Indians. Most tribal land was recollectivized in 1934.

Asia

• China has been through a series of land reforms:
  • The thorough land reform launched by the Communist Party of China in 1946, three years before the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), won the party millions of supporters among the poor and middle peasantry. The land and other property of landlords were expropriated and redistributed so that each household in a rural village would have a comparable holding. This agrarian revolution was made famous in the West by William Hinton's book Fanshen.
  • In the mid-1950s, a second land reform compelled individual farmers to join collectives, which, in turn, were grouped into People's Communes with centrally controlled property rights and an egalitarian principle of distribution. This policy was generally a failure in terms of production. [1] There is evidence that the PRC began to reverse this policy even in the 1960s.
  • A third land reform beginning in the late 1970s re-introduced family-based contract system called the Household Responsibility System, which had enormous initial success, followed by a period of relative stagnation. Chen, Wang, and Davis [1998] suggest that the later stagnation was due, in part, to a system of periodic redistribution that encouraged over-exploitation rather than capital investment in future productivity. [2]

• India: Due the taxation and regulation under the British Raj, at the time of independence, India inherited a semi-feudal agrarian system, with ownership of land concentrated with a few individual landlords (Zamindars, Zamindari System). Since independence, there has been voluntary and state initiated/mediated land reforms in several states. The most notable and successful example of land reforms is in the state of West Bengal. After promising land reforms and elected to power, the Communist Party of India kept their word and initiated gradual land reforms. The result was a more equitable distribution of land among the landless farmers. This has ensured an almost life long loyalty from the farmers and the communists have been in power ever since. Another successful land reform program was launched in Jammu and Kashmir after 1947.
  • However, this success was not replicated in other areas like Kerala - the only other state where communists came to power - and the states of Andhra and Madhya Pradesh, where the more radical wing of the CPI, the PWG (People's War Group) or Naxalites resorted to violence as it failed to secure power. Even in West Bengal, the economy suffered for a long time as a result of the communist economic policies that did little to encourage heavy industries. In the state of Bihar, tensions between land owners militia, villagers and Maoists have resulted in numerous massacres.
  • All in all, land reforms have been successful only in pockets of the country, as people have often found loopholes in the laws setting limits on the maximum area of land held by any one person.
• Japan: After World War II, the U.S. occupying forces conducted a land reform in Japan.
• Taiwan: In the years after World War II, Chiang Kai-shek conducted land reform at the insistence of the U.S. This course of action was made possible, in part, by the fact that many of the large landowners were Japanese who had fled and also by the fact that the Kuomintang were mostly from the mainland and had few ties to the remaining indigenous landowners.
• Vietnam: In the years after World War II, even before the formal division of Vietnam, land reform was initiated in North Vietnam. This land reform redistributed land to more than 2 million poor peasants, but at a cost of from tens to hundreds of thousands of lives and was one of the main reason for the mass exodus of 1 million people from the North to the South in 1954. South Vietnam made several further attempts in the post-Diem years, the most ambitious being the Land to the Tiller program instituted in 1970 by President Nguyen Van Thieu. This limited individuals to 15 hectares, compensated the owners of expropriated tracts, and extended legal title to peasants who in areas under control of the South Vietnamese government to whom had land had previously been distributed by the Viet Cong. Mark Moyar [1996] asserts that while it was effectively implemented only in some parts of the country, "In the Mekong Delta and the provinces around Saigon, the program worked extremely well... It reduced the percentage of total cropland cultivated by tenants from sixty percent to ten percent in three years." [3]
• South Korea: In 1945–1950, United States and South Korean authorities carried out a land reform that retained the institution of private property. They confiscated and redistributed all land held by the Japanese colonial government, Japanese companies, and individual Japanese colonists. The Korean government carried out a reform whereby Koreans with large landholdings were obliged to divest most of their land. A new class of independent, family proprietors was created. [4]

See also

• Agrarian reform
• Anti-globalization movement
• Communism
• Eminent domain
• Homestead principle
• Georgism
• Land rights
• Restitution
• Squatter

Contrast:

• Inclosure

External links

• Land Research Action Network:News, Analysis, and Research on Land Reform
• Land Reform in Scotland
• Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe
• The Land Reform of 1919–1940: Lithuania and the Countries of East and Central Europe
• FAO Multilingual Thesaurus on Land Tenure
• FAO International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD), March 2006
• Civil Society conference "Land, Territory and Dignity", March 2006
• William Rees-Mogg, South Africa's bitter harvest, The Times, 11 September 2006

• World Bank archived online discussion: "Can Formal Property Titling Programs Ensure Increased Business Investments and Growth?"

References

• Fu Chen, Liming Wang and John Davis, "Land reform in rural China since the mid-1980s", Land Reform 1998/2, a publication of the Sustainable Development Department of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
• William H. Hinton. Fanshen: A documentary of revolution in a Chinese village. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966. ISBN 0-520-21040-9.
• Mark Moyar, "Villager attitudes during the final decade of the Vietnam War". Presented at 1996 Vietnam Symposium "After the Cold War: Reassessing Vietnam".
• Summary of "Efficiency and wellbeing for 80 years" by Tarmo Luoma on site of TEHO magazine.