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Failures of Agrarian Reform
7. Agrarian reforms intended to
ensure a more just division of land ownership and use have been implemented in
many developing countries in recent decades, but have proved a deep
disappointment, except in those few cases where they have fulfilled their aims.
One of the main errors has been
the belief that agrarian reform consists essentially in the simple distribution
and re-allocation of land.
Failure can be laid partly at the
door of an erroneous interpretation of the needs of the agricultural sector as
it moves from a subsistence phase to one of integration with the domestic and
international markets, and partly at that of a lack of professional skill in
planning, organizing and managing such reforms.(8)
Basically, efforts at agrarian
reform have failed in their various aims of reducing the concentration of
landholdings, of creating farm units capable of autonomous growth, and of
preventing the expulsion of large masses of peasant farmers from the land and
their migration to urban centers or to land that is still free, but which may
be marginal and poor in social infrastructures.
8. In many cases, governments
have not paid enough attention to providing areas subject to agrarian reform
with the necessary infrastructures and social services, to setting up an
efficient organization for technical assistance, to ensuring equitable access
to credit at sustainable costs, to curbing distortions that favour
large landholdings, and to fixing prices and forms of the farmers' payment for
land that are compatible with what is needed for its development and with the
living requirements of their families. Small farmers are often forced into
debt. They then have to sell their rights and give up farming.
A second important cause of the
failure of agrarian reforms is the scant attention paid to the history and
cultural traditions of agricultural societies, which has often resulted in a
bias in favour of a large-scale landholding system as
against traditional forms of land tenure.
Two more factors have also tended
to seriously destabilise the reform process: firstly,
a scandalous series of forms of corruption, political subservience and
collusion, leading to the granting of huge tracts of land to members of the
ruling classes; and secondly, the presence of important foreign interests,
concerned about the effects of any reform on their economic activities.
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