Food First Releases a New Report on Land Reform

Press Release 15mar01

World Bank’s Market-Inspired Reforms Likely to Fail while Landless Movements Grow

Full report on line at: http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2001/w01v7n1.html

Oakland, CA -- After decades of grassroots pressure, the World Bank recently agreed that inequitable access to land in the Third world is a key cause of poverty and that land reform is integral to economic development. However, the Bank’s market-based reforms are unlikely to reduce poverty while landless movements throughout the world have taken land reform upon themselves by occupying and farming idle lands belonging to absentee landlords, according to a new report from Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, Tides Shift on Agrarian Reform: New Movements Show the Way. This report analyzes World Bank policy, land reform, and why landless movements have taken matters into their own hands.

"While we applaud the World Bank for recognizing the importance of the land issue, we fear their policy prescriptions are doomed to failure," says Dr. Peter Rosset, Food First Co-director and author of the report. "The market responds to money, not human need, and it is hard to see how the poor will benefit. On the other hand, there are good options available to us."

The report says that the World Bank’s market-based land reforms are likely to repeat the errors of the failed reforms, because they burden the poor with heavy debts to pay for poor quality lands. Free-market policies can prompt mass sell-offs of land, causing land concentration to occur again, driving a new cycle of landlessness among those with the greatest need.

In contrast, the report looks at the landless movements sweeping across the world, specifically focusing on Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which has settled 250,000 families on more than 15 million acres of land, in the face of fierce opposition.

"The total cost to the state to maintain the same number of people in an urban shanty town is twelve times the cost of legalizing land occupations," said Dr. Rosset. "The beneficiaries are measurably better off than other poor people in Brazil."

The report concludes with several recommendations which include relieving families of heavy debt burdens when they acquire land, ensuring the right of women to hold title to land, that land distributed must be of good quality, that the power of the rural elites be broken so as not to interfere with reforms, and that there be a supportive policy environment for small farm agriculture, in order for land reform to be successful.

Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy was founded in 1975 by Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins following the success of the book, Diet for A Small Planet. Recognized as "one of the country’s most established food policy think tanks" by The New York Times, Food First is a leading progressive think tank and education-for-action center.

For more information or to interview Dr. Peter Rosset, please contact Nick Parker, Media Coordinator, at (510) 654-4400, ext. 229. , nparker@foodfirst.org