ABSTRACT
During the years of evolving agri-environmental programmes in the North Atlantic countries, events of another kind were attracting attention in developing countries. They included conflicts over access to land in Latin America, southern Africa and the Philippines and what has been termed ‘de-agrarianization’, especially in Africa and large parts of tropical Asia. This chapter and the next describe these changes and their context mainly through discussion of particular areas. The present chapter takes up the collisions over land in the specific cases of Mexico and Brazil, with briefer reference to land reform issues elsewhere. We use the opportunity to touch on the wider issues of land reform in the twentieth century, within which the period 1910-70 has been appropriately described as the ‘golden age’ of land reform (Bernstein 2004).
