Contributions from
the Column
Tribune

Development stepchild: land reforms deserve donor support

Solar solutions for Andean people

Policy networks help to improve global governance


02/2006
  

[ Land reform ]

Development stepchild

The absolute number of undernourished people in the world has grown over the past few years. Rural areas are particularly hard hit. Redistributive land reforms are necessary and deserve bilateral and multilateral support.


[ By Armin Paasch ]

At the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, the international community pledged to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015. At the time, that number amounted to 840 million, according to UN statistics. In 2005, however, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimated that 852 million people worldwide were undernourished. A decade has been lost. Sadly, it does not even look like the less ambitious Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the share of the world population (rather than the absolute number) suffering from hunger will be met.

According to the United Nations Development Programme’s Task Force on Hunger, about 80% of the undernourished live in rural regions, despite advancing urbanisation (Windfuhr, 2005). About half are members of peasant families, of which two thirds are considered “marginalised”. These people cultivate smallholdings, which are often of poor quality and remote. Normally, they enjoy no legal protection, and are denied access to credit or seed supplies. In addition, they are disadvantaged by poor infrastructure and their dependence on middlemen. Approximately 22% of the undernourished have no land at all and hire out their labour. Eight percent are nomads, depending on fishing or forest resources for survival.

Implementing the human right to adequate food must start with those who either suffer from, or live with the threat of, chronic hunger. During the past decades, however, their core group has been marginalised even further. Structural change, the continuing commercialisation of resources such as land, water and seed, the decline in prices for agricultural goods as well as the asymmetric liberalisation of agricultural trade have worsened the situation of peasants and the landless. Bilateral and multilateral development cooperation has also neglected them. Funding in this area was cut from $25 billion in 1986 to $12 billion in 2000 (Windfuhr, 2005).


Wrong budgetary decisions

German development expenditure on agriculture has also diminished rapidly. Spending on agriculture, fisheries and development-oriented food security has been cut by more than half, from ¤298 million in 1997 to only ¤140 million in 2003, even though Germany’s red-green coalition had emphasised agrarian reform and support for small-scale farmers in its “Programme of Action 2015”.

Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, has also repeatedly called on the government to step up support for land and agrarian reforms. But that did not happen.

Instead, even successful projects have fallen victim to cuts. For example, German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) had backed the Bondoc Development Programme on the Philippines island of Luzón from 1990 to 2003. It helped tenants and farm workers to assert their rights in the context of the national land reform. According to a local partner organisation, the programme had helped about 7520 households to obtain their own land by 2002.

Nevertheless, GTZ suspended all support for the project in June 2003. The German Development Ministry (BMZ) had initially approved a follow-up scheme, to provide the peasants with continued legal assistance. But then the budget was cut – and funding for Bondoc was discontinued. The results were disastrous. After the project ended, a wave of repression washed over the peasant community. Three representatives of the local landless organisation were murdered. For marginalised people, cooperation with a Western donor means protection.

Responding to criticism from non-governmental organisations for its lack of support for land reforms, the German Development Ministry often points out that multilateral cooperation is more efficient in this area. That may indeed hold true in theory. However, it is questionable whether current initiatives at the multilateral level – at least in the case of the World Bank – are really serving those suffering from chronic malnutrition any better.


Disoriented World Bank

In principle, it is possible for state-led land reforms to expropriate large landowners for a relatively modest compensation. Such land is then redistributed to the poor and landless. This has been done in Brazil and the Philippines. However, the World Bank model demands that the original owners are paid the full market price, in order to give them an incentive to take part in the reforms.

The snag, however, is that the “beneficiaries”, in order to acquire land, must either own the required capital or take out a loan, which they must then repay (with interest). For this reason, very little land was redistributed in Brazil, Colombia and South Africa, as studies have shown. Moreover, only a few beneficiaries were in a position to pay back their loans (FIAN, 2003). Inflated prices, poor quality and remote location of the land were additional complications. Grants for infrastructure investment in Brazil did not suffice to facilitate a profitable production of cash crops (Borras, 2003).

In all three countries, the World Bank failed to meet its reform goals – both in quantitative and qualitative terms. The fact that other reform strategies, based on the expropriation of fallow land, were suppressed in countries like Brazil makes the promotion of market-led land reforms even more problematic. Colombia and Brazil have even reduced the legal scope for expropriation. Furthermore, the World Bank’s one-sided policy towards market-led models has had an impact on budgetary decisions.

The World Bank acknowledged some shortcomings in a comprehensive report in 2003. For example, many Colombian farmers were unable to repay their debts. In South Africa, only 200,000 hectares of land had changed hands by 1999, instead of the 29.7 million hectares anticipated. The Bank, however, has not put in question its underlying philosophy. Bucking the international trend, it has even increased its funding of land policy. It claims that the number of approved land reform projects has escalated in recent years. Apart from market-led land reforms, these projects also include setting-up land registers, land titling programmes and the promotion of land lease markets.

Between 1990 and 1994, the World Bank approved only three projects, but by 1999 this number had already increased to 19, with an overall volume of more than $700 million. Since then, 25 projects have been approved with a volume of over a billion dollars. The World Bank has thus strengthened its land-related policy influence in the countries concerned.

Germany’s red-green government used to second many of the reservations voiced by FIAN and the international peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina, in regard to the World Bank strategy. But until now, the Development Ministry has not decisively challenged the World Bank on this policy. New World Bank loans are currently being negotiated with El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. These talks present a good opportunity to reconsider the exclusively market-led approach with the goal of a paradigm shift.


The right to food

On the other hand, the German government has earned great merit over the past few years with its commitment to strengthening and implementing the human right to adequate food. It was largely thanks to its commitment that the member states of the FAO unanimously adopted the so-called “voluntary guidelines on the right to food” in 2004. These guidelines emphasise the importance of better access to land: “Where necessary and appropriate, States should carry out land reforms and other policy reforms consistent with their human rights obligations and in accordance with the rule of law in order to secure efficient and equitable access to land and to strengthen pro-poor growth” (FAO, 2004). The guidelines emphasise that land reforms should benefit those groups that are most affected or most threatened by hunger, explicitly mentioning women, indigenous communities and herders.

If the Federal Government is serious about seeing the right to food implemented, it must be as vocal in its support for action as it was in the case of adopting the principles. Pro-poor land and agrarian reforms must become a focal point for German development policy – and not only on paper. There are windows of opportunity both at bilateral and multilateral levels.

The GTZ experience in the Philippines has shown that advising and supporting tenants and farm workers in cooperation with local NGOs can lead to results. At the very least, the German Development Ministry remains responsible for safeguarding successes already achieved. The beneficiaries need to be protected from violence. The Luzón project should therefore serve as a model for similar projects in bilateral cooperation.

In addition to keeping a watchful eye on the World Bank’s land policy, the new Federal Government should strengthen its multilateral commitment to agrarian reform in the EU and the FAO. The EU guidelines on land issues offer a good starting point (EU 2004). They were adopted last year with a critical stance towards market-led land reform and a reference to human rights. These guidelines should serve both the EU and its member states as a cooperation blueprint. The FAO also hopes to breathe fresh life into the promotion of these issues at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in Brazil next month.

The German government has so far paid too little attention to, and had too little impact on, the important progress made in the international development discourse. If we are to believe the announcements made by Christian Democrats and Social Democrats before and immediately after the elections, we should expect some action on this front in this parliamentary term. Both parties should remember their pledges to increase the budget for rural development and to boost support for redistributive land reforms.



Armin Paasch
is an advisor on land reform with the German Section of the FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN).
apaasch@yahoo.de


References:
Borras, S. M., 2003:
“Questioning Market-Led Agrarian Reform. Experiences from Brazil, Colombia and South Africa.” Journal for Agrarian Change, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 2003), pp. 367-394.
EU Land Policy Guidelines, 2004: p. 16 f,
FAO, 2004:
Voluntary Guidelines to support the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security, Rome, Guideline 8.
FIAN Germany, 2003:
Zugang zu Land: Zwischen Markt und Menschenrechten. Die Weltbank entdeckt die Landreform (Access to land: between market and human rights. The World Bank discovers land reform), Herne.
Windfuhr, Michael, 2005:
Antwort auf die Fragen zur Öffentlichen Anhörung des Ausschusses für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung am 20. April 2005 (Response to questions on the public hearing of the Committee for German Economic Cooperation and Development on 20 April 2005), p. 4 f.
World Bank, 2003:
Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, Washington:
http://econ.worldbank.org/prr/land_policy/text-27809/