ABSTRACT
To over-simplify, land reform comprises laws with the main goal of reducing poverty by substantially increasing the proportion of farmland controlled by the poor, and thereby their income, power or status. The Appendix states and justifies a more precise definition – and fits it into the concept of reform, which has in the recent past been hijacked. However, for now, the point is that land reform ‘matters’ mainly for its effect on poor people. Poverty is about much more than income or consumption. However, a
narrow definition of extreme ‘income poverty’ is: having income normally not sufficient to meet basic calorie and other needs. Based on household surveys covering over 90 per cent of people in the developing world, the line of extreme income (or ‘dollar’) poverty is now usually set at $1.25 PPP (purchasingpower parity) per person per day in prices of 2005. In 1980, half the people in the developing world were dollar-poor; by 2005, it was a quarter [Ravallion 2008].1
Absolute poverty probably fell more in 1950-2005 than in 0-1950. How? GDP growth helped, but cannot be the whole story. It is farm GDP on
which the dollar-poor mainly depend.2 The green revolution made poverty far less than it would have been otherwise (pp. 83-7, 112-7), but barely enabled farm GDP in the developing world to keep pace with population – allowing for the fall in farm product prices, not even that (except in East Asia).3 The sharp acceleration of poverty reduction is due in large part to the addition, to employment-creating technical progress in food production, of land reform. Most modern land reform has happened in a roundabout way. In 1910-80,
very unequal landholdingswere collectivised, in succession inMexico, the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and parts of other Asian, African and Latin American countries. This was often disastrous, and seldom achieved the main goal of land reform (chapter 5(a)). Decollectivisation, mostly since 1977, in many cases led to small, not-very-unequal farms. This land reform by detour now affects over a billion people dependent on agriculture (chapter 5(b)). Perhaps a further half-billion obtained farmland or work since 1945 from major reductions of land inequality through land reforms that distributed private rights from large owners to small and landless agriculturists. This affected, in
succession, Japan, East Asia, much of South Asia and Latin America, and some of Africa (chapters 3-4). Today, land reform is often pronounced dead (chapter 7).4
One would not think so in Bolivia, Brazil, China, the Philippines, South Africa, much of the former USSR, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe or cyberspace.5
