Agrarian reform and rural development

Land reform is back on the policy agenda of international development institutions as well as of many nation states. ¹ Globally, poverty still has primarily a rural face, with two-thirds of the world’s poor constituted by the rural poor. Its persistence has defied policy makers for decades despite sustained efforts by national governments, international institutions and civil society. Effective control over productive resources, especially land, by the rural poor is crucial to their capacity to construct a rural livelihood and overcome poverty. This is because in many agrarian settings a significant portion of the income of the rural poor still comes from farming, despite far-reaching livelihood diversification processes that occurred in different places over time. ² Hence, lack of access to land is strongly related to poverty and inequality. ³ It is therefore not altogether surprising that the World Bank’s 2006 World Development Report, focusing on the question of equity, has underscored the importance of land access (World Bank, 2005: chapter 8). However, policy discussions around the Millennium Development Goals are yet to systematically and significantly include the issue of wealth and power redistribution in the rural areas, i.e. agrarian reform, especially in a situation where the majority of the world’s poor are rural poor (CPRC, 2005). The need for land reform in the context of the global campaign against poverty has also been one of the key conclusions of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) held on 6–10 March 2006 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations and the Brazilian government (see, e.g. Cotula et al., 2006; Leite with Avila, 2006; Merlet et al., 2006).