ABSTRACT
The main goal of land reform’s supporters is to reduce gross inequality of rural land rights, and thus to cut poverty. Much genuine land reform has happened, and has achieved this goal, in developing countries. Some is still happening, though often in new forms, but why not more? The obvious reply: because big landowners lose from land reform and can sometimes stop it. However, much land reform also enhances farm output (chapter 2). Extra output means, in principle, that land gainers can still gain, even though land losers are compensated to the extent politically or morally necessary or desirable.1 Extra output also makes it easier for the State to borrow, or tax, to provide public-goods infrastructure for reform beneficiaries. Why, then, has not much more land reform happened? The usual answer is resistance by, and power of, self-interested groups.
First, big landowners usually want to resist, because they doubt that they will be properly compensated for full land value, which may include leverage in other markets (for credit, work or crops) and local political power. Second, big landowners usually can resist. They are well connected to the power élite, including the judiciary. They can also organise more readily than can potential land recipients. Each of a few dozen huge owners, paying a subscription to support a pressure group, can check that colleagues do the same. Each of many thousand potential land recipients cannot [Olson 1971]. Also, the rural poor often have cause to fear sanctions from big landowners if they agitate for land reform. Third, it is ‘seemingly ubiquitous’ [Novemsky and Kahneman 2005] that people are readier to invest time, money and effort in avoiding a loss than in securing an equivalent gain.2 Fourth, powerful people other than landowners may feel threatened by land reform. The urban rich may fear that, if it succeeds, their own interests will be challenged next. Poor urban food buyers may fear that smaller farmers will eat their product, rather than supplying it cheaply the cities. However, these explanations do not suffice. The rural poor are a big, and
(despite the difficulties) in many countries increasingly organised, interest group. It is in the interest of other groups to accommodate them peacefully.
The cost to others of peaceful, well considered land reform can be contained, or compensated to some extent, and is less than the cost of rural unrest. If self-interested group opposition to land reform is to explain why much
more has not happened, there needs to be intellectual backing to convince neutrals, in and out of power. This backing is the argument that land reform will harm other key goals, on which objective persons largely agree. Even if land reform cuts rural inequality, will it address poverty, in particular manifestations (female poverty, ethnic poverty and so on) or generally? Even if so, is land reform the best way to attack poverty? If so, will there be grave cost to another goal: liberty, and (arguably part of that) respect for legitimate property rights? Will land reform harm output, efficiency or growth, perhaps because large farms are more efficient or dynamic than small ones?3 Does land reform threaten environmental sustainability, or economic stability? It is the belief that land reform will harm largely shared goals that allows its opponents to plead not self-interest but virtue; puts reformers in the opposite position; and makes it harder to persuade neutrals. This chapter identifies the goals themselves, and the channels through which land reform may affect them. Each group – big landowners, rural land-hungry, urban food buyers, politi-
cians – has goals. Often they are self-interested, but there is considerable consensus for personal freedom, growth, ‘just’ asset distribution, stability and sustainability. Big disagreements remain, not only about trade-offs among goals4 but also about defining goals: big landowners and the landless differ about what is a just land distribution. Also, even if a goal is agreed, most people would prefer others to pay for it. Nevertheless, progress in land reform is likelier if we define people’s policy goals, and assess how land reforms affect them.
(i) Goals, groups, coalitions, procedures, aims and programmes
