ABSTRACT
I write this introduction in late September and early October 2008, while two major development issues are preoccupying the international community. The first is the debate on the slow or unsatisfactory progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of poverty and hunger (or chronic undernourishment) by the year 2015. These goals were adopted by 189 heads of States at the UN General Assembly held in New York in September 2000 (Known as the Millennium Summit). The second major international development issue is the financial market failure and the collapse of stock markets in the leading market economies (USA, European Union and Japan) and in most developing countries. In both events, world leaders have clearly stressed the necessity of government
intervention in the market to speed up the pace of poverty reduction, and to rescue the economic systems from the adverse consequences of the global financial crisis and the impending economic recession. The urgency of government action is also confirmed by the executive bodies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in their joint meeting in Washington, DC on 8-9 October 2008 and all the heads of the European Union’s member states in their meeting in Brussels on 15 October 2008. This is a major shift by the heads of rich countries and powerful financing institutions, who, until very recently and since the mid-1980s, have been lecturing poor countries to obey free market rules, and to abandon both government intervention in the market (including redistributive land reform) and central planning for national economic activities. With regard to agriculture/rural development and the rapid reduction in land-
distribution inequality and poverty/malnourishment incidence, the need for an active state role, that is only pronounced in October 2008, constitutes a common theme in the essays across this volume, which have been written since 1952. Other subjects such as land concentration, participation of the major section of the agricultural population in rural development, who benefits from agricultural/ economic growth, falling food production together with declining cultivable land area and the command over both food and family labour of the land reform beneficiaries are considered aspects of this common theme. They, as well as poverty and hunger, are defined and quantitatively measured in the essays, and
are interdependent. This interdependence is manifested in the fact that poverty and chronic malnourishment in rural areas point to gross inequality in land/income distribution as a pressing policy issue.1 They also point to the importance of the effective implementation of land policy, because a sound land reform policy needs appropriate focusing and targeting to reduce the poverty of peasants, nomads and landless workers. Redistributive land reform, therefore, creates an environment that is conducive to bringing about their unrealized potential as its major goal. Hence the pertinence of this book title.
The issues in the essays, which are presented in two parts, are summarized in the following questions, which are a synthesis of the development problems and policies investigated in this volume. For the convenience of the reader, the number of the part followed by that of the chapter (or chapters) where the subjects of each question are discussed appear in parentheses after each question (e.g. I: 2, 4, and II: 12, 15). The questions are:
