D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 4, July/August 2001, p. 26)

"To the outside world, the government creates the impression that it is going to implement land reform, but de facto its criminalising of the landless movement is laying the foundations for civil war." Bishop Tomás Balduino, of the Brazilian Bishop's Conference Comissao Pastoral da Terra, did not mince words at a conference on agricultural reform at the Gustav Stresemann Institute in Bonn, end-March. The pugnacious churchman sees the reason for the Brazilian government's rigid rejection of all concessions to the MST, the leading organisation of the country's landless, not so much as opposition to handing over unutilised land to those have none at all. Rather, he says, it is because "these poor people defend themselves in a highly-motivated and radical way against a repressive model which marginalises the poor and which dominates in national, continental and worldwide terms".

His expert audience would have liked to have heard the Brazilian government's reply. But the administration of Fernando Cardoso was most notable for its absence. Many present said they regretted that because the conference organisers, the German Foundation for International Development (DSE) and the Working Group on Poverty Reduction (AKA), had designed it as a neutral forum to discuss the current situation in the countries represented and establish where solutions based on experiences in others could be sought together. In Brazil's case, the Church, the landless movement and academics were the country's only representatives.

More than 110 international delegates attended the conference, titled 'Access to Land: Innovative Agricultural Reforms for Sustainability and Poverty Reduction'. They included nine country delegations, each consisting of four representatives of governments (except for Brazil), NGOs and farmers' associations. Divided into nine working groups, they each presented the situation in their countries: South Africa, Mauritania, Cambodia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Georgia, Guatemala, Brazil and Bolivia.

The individual problems differ from country to country as much as the countries themselves. In the Sahel zone, conflicts between cattle-breeding nomads and farmers often result in bloody clashes. In Bolivia last year, a new farming law aroused the Indians and smallholders, who saw it as one-sided support of big landowners. In Cambodia, the major task is to overcome the aftermath of the civil war and excesses of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Land cannot be increased. On the contrary, like water, it is becoming ever scarcer. Therefore, it was necessary to consider the redistribution of land and design of appropriate social arrangements in order to tackle a main cause of poverty and hunger, said Uschi Eid, junior minister in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in opening the conference. It was important, she added, that conflicts over land were solved only peacefully. "If land reform is necessary it must take place within the framework of the rule of law and without violence. All involved in violent conflicts can only lose."

Conflicts over land

Eid said the conference should be seen in the context of German development policy, which first and foremost supported conflict prevention and poverty reduction. And because that was a "conflict-loaded subject", in which the views about the "right approach" to it were far apart, the idea was to try to bring the spectrum of opinion together in Bonn. She said the demands on the politicians were great. According to the latest FAO report on the 'State of Food and Agriculture', 826 million people worldwide - 792 million of them in developing countries - did not have enough to eat. Eid said she regretted that this figure had hardly declined in recent years. At the same time, the global development target for 2015 was a halving of the proportion of the world's population living in absolute poverty and hunger.

The land issue is currently going through an renascence. Specialist conferences worldwide are rediscussing the control of land and assessing it in political terms. The times are past when land reform was a distinctly 'left-wing' subject. The present debates reach into the political mainstream. If experts of the World Bank and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) are now racking their brains over the subject, that is to be attributed to stubborn lobbying by NGOs. The latter have not lost sight of the topic for one moment since the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. Their arguments are focused on the human rights aspect.

How can the goal of poverty reduction be achieved with the instruments of development cooperation? Most poor and hungry people still live on and from the land. What reforms are necessary to ensure them access to resources? Many experts say land and agricultural reforms have a central role in solving the poverty problem. Jochen Donner, spokesman for the AKA, a union of government, non-government and church organisations, agrees. "It is necessary to establish favorable conditions to give the poor better access to productive agricultural land," he said.

But opinions on what practical shape that should take are far apart. The human rights organisation FIAN says agricultural reforms must satisfy demands for human rights, meaning smallholders must be given control over land, seed and water. That is why the World Bank concept of 'country banks', now being implemented in Brazil and Guatemala, is meeting with opposition. FIAN expert Martin Wolpold-Bosien criticised the Bank for operating on the principle of "land for those who can afford it". He said: "The social function of property is fading more and more into the background." FIAN feared that the World Bank approach was leading more to a reconcentration rather than a redistribution of resources. As part of their joint global agricultural reform campaign, FIAN and 'La Via Campesina', the world federation of smallholders, say it is important to note that land is more than a commodity. In a petition they demand revision of the market-oriented land reform model.