Land Reform : Global Crosscurrents and the Indian Scene
--Arindam Sen
Is land reform an anachronism in the era of liberalisation and IT-led growth? Most certainly, Indian policy makers will assert. Yes they are – World Bank officials would say -- if you have in mind the archaic, stale, imposed type, but we have put on sale an upgraded, market-friendly version that fits the Third World bill even today. And there is also a peasants’ response to the question, voiced in action by radical left parties and organisations like the MST in Brazil and the CPI (M-L) in India. But let us first check out the latest arrival on the reform circuit.
The New Mantra
“Agrarian reform is also moving back into the mainstream
of development thinking”, says Vinay Bhargava, Country director of the
World Bank (WB) in the Philippines, citing the 2000-01 World Development Report.
The main area of concern is not egalitarianism, but “the disproportionately
low rate of rural investment and growth”, and the Bank advocates reform
because it believes that “insecure property rights to land and a skewed
land ownership distribution are likely to be key factors responsible for such
low levels of investment”. (Bhargava, 2000) The traditional logic of bourgeois
land reform (to promote growth by transferring land from large owners to more
efficient medium/small family farms) is thus back in focus. But there is a special
condition: the transfer has to be on a “willing seller, willing buyer”
basis, with the government’s role restricted to establishing the necessary
legal-institutional framework and helping eligible beneficiaries with land purchase
grants. It is along these lines that the WB and the Asian Development Bank (ADB)
are sponsoring various schemes in cooperation with Third World governments.
Interestingly, the political as well as economic compulsions facing these governments
are but fallouts of globalisation: the need to arrest rural unrest in a context
of rapidly deteriorating conditions of the toiling peasantry, improve agricultural
productivity so as to withstand the extremely unequal global price war, and
earn more foreign exchange to pay the rising import bills.
How about the success rate of these market-based projects? Quite disappointing
in terms of land redistributed and landless/land-poor families benefited. Let
us take just two examples. In Colombia, Law 160 enacted in 1994 launched an
ambitious scheme where eligible applicants were to receive a subsidy of 70 per
cent toward the purchase of land. They were expected to form cooperatives for
negotiating deals with large landowners. According to a UN commission report,
by 1998 it was clear that the programme was almost a non-starter. This was so
because of a number of constraints like high land prices, the threat of landlord
violence, the cumbersome bureaucracy associated with land transfer, high transaction
costs that keep the poor peasants at bay, and so on.
The record of the post-apartheid Mandela government has been no better. It planned
to redistribute 30 per cent of farmland between 1994-99 but no more than 0.6
per cent of the targeted land was actually redistributed.
The basic reason behind the failure of market-based reform (at least in its
pure form) is easy to see. In Third World countries, landholdings are regarded
not simply as income yielding assets, but as foundations of social status and
political power at the village level. Along with other distortions in the largely
pre-capitalist land market, this pushes the market value of land well above
its agronomic value. In other words, the price of land hovers above the capitalized
value of income from land. The poor cannot, as a rule, buy and maintain land
without reducing their consumption below that of wageworkers, and small loans
or grants hardly alter their situation.
Even when a poor peasant manages to acquire land under the market model of ‘reform’,
the extra burden of the loan repayment compels him to sell off the land quicker
than small holders in general often have to. ‘Reform’ thus actually
works as a transition from old feudal/semi-feudal concentration to capitalist
concentration of land and that is the basic motive behind the whole exercise.
In Latin American countries, it is well known how the parceleros (new owners
of small land parcels), unable to continue installment payments and to finance
their operations, have to sell off their parcelas. The much-publicized “peasantisation”
thus turns out to be “impoverishing peasantisation”. As William
C. Thiesenhusen, veteran scholar on land reforms in Latin America, aptly points
out, “… governments usually make certain that granting of land gets
publicity but not incomes that have been neutralized by other policies. What
governments gave out with a flourish, they often took away by stealth”.
(Thiesenhusen, 2000)
The ineffectiveness of the World Bank brand of land reform becomes all the more
clear when it is studied in conjunction with the two other ‘old’
models – namely, governmental acquisition (followed by redistribution)
of land with compensation and radical Left-led land grab movement. (We do not
consider here cases of comprehensive agrarian reform in course of successful
revolution, as in china.) For this, let us turn to Brazil, a country which has
experienced all three models in the recent past.
Market Reform Vs Land grab in Brazil
Polarized between a small number of latifundios (very large
landholdings, including plantations and haciendas or large estates) and innumerable
minifundios (very small holdings) the Latin American agrarian system desperately
needs thoroughgoing land reform. In addition to the revolutions in Mexico (1917),
Bolivia (1952), Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979), radical reforms were also
undertaken in Chile just before and during the Allende rule (1970-73). Despite
reverses in all these cases barring Cuba, the new rulers have not been able
to undo the reforms completely. In Nicaragua for example, the Sandinistas redistributed
more than a million hectares (about a third of the country’s arable land)
to about two lakh families, but much of the actual conferment of permanent tittles
was done after that regime was ousted. In an overall sense, of course, the Latin
American scene is best summed up in the words of Thiesenhusen quoted above.
Coming to Brazil, the largest and most populous country in this continent, our
attention is immediately drawn to the activities of the “Movimiento dos
Sam Terra” (MST) or Landless Peasants’ Movement. Born in the 1980s,
it is recognised as the biggest and best organised among the rural poor’s
movements in the country. Along with many other social activities, it is engaged
in largescale land occupation struggles which are concentrated in rich states
like Parana and Sao Paulo. In the mid-’90s the agrarian movement became
a national issue when dozens of landless peasants were killed and hundreds injured
during an eviction drive against land occupants in Para and Rondonia states.
In 1996 alone, as many as 47,433 families were settled on occupied land throughout
Brazil. The general experience is that in areas dominated by the right, the
occupiers are frequently dislodged by aggressive landlords and paramilitary
units sent by state governors. The case is quite different in regions where
large numbers of landless families are organised in large-scale occupations.
Thus in Parana state more than 10,000 families were mobilized to seize an estate
covering several thousand acres. The loosely organised landowners did not dare
to take recourse to violence, while the government was not prepared to bear
the heavy political cost of sending its armed forces. (Petras, 1998)
It was in a charged situation like this that President Cardoso, elected at the
end of 1994, found it prudent to launch the official land reform programme.
A new ministry was created, and budgetary allocations made for compensating
expropriated landowners. By 1998, around 7.8 million hectares of unproductive
land (about 25 per cent of Brazilian farms covering 62.4 per cent of agricultural
land are officially rated as unproductive, and these were taken as primary targets
for expropriation) were acquired by the government and 2,18,000 families resettled.
Valid doubts have been expressed regarding the accuracy of these official claims,
but no one would say nothing was done.
The traditional type of state-imposed land reform was gradually abandoned since
1999 under the pretext of necessary budget cuts as part of IMF conditionalities
in the context of the 1999 economic crisis. In the meantime, market based land
reform had been initiated in 1997 with the WB-sponsored “Pilot Project
of Land Reform and Poverty Alleviation”. This was a US $150 million project,
with the WB providing US $90 million for developing infrastructure (the amount
is not allowed to be used for financing purchase of land). Under the scheme,
peasants are to repay loans taken for land purchase in 20 years, with 4 or 6
or 8 per cent interest depending on the loan amount.
The greater part of the programme implementation was achieved just before presidential
elections in 1998. At the end of the decade, the WB claimed that the scheme
had benefited 8,000 families with 1,90,000 hectares of land. According to an
independent evaluation by professors of State Universities, however, these claims
were highly exaggerated and the programme suffered from very serious problems
like corruption and favoritism on the part of the local leaders, bank managers
and government officials in selecting beneficiaries, peasants’ incapacity
to negotiate with landlords on an equal footing and government officials safeguarding
the interests of the latter, and so on. The MST and the National Forum for Land
Reform also have rejected the market approach in categorical terms. But the
Brazilian authorities and WB have ignored all objections and launched the second
phase of the programme in newer areas.
So much for Brazil. Let us now move over to the Philippines, a country that
offers one of the richest current experiences of land reform.
“Bibingka” strategy in Philippines
The Philippines is the only country to have experienced a
comparatively successful land reform (covering around 47 per cent of total farmland)
– with all sorts of limitations, of course — even in the non-conducive
neo-liberal milieu of the 1990s. This was made possible thanks to a symbiotic
combination of reform initiatives from above by the state and mass peasant mobilization
from below — a combination known as the bibingka or sandwich strategy.
Historically, powerful peasant movements since World War II, especially since
the reestablishment of the Communist Party of Philippines in 1968, which led
a wave of land occupations in the mid and late 1980s, forced successive governments
to introduce one land reform legislation after another, but little was actually
achieved. Communists on the other hand were engaged in armed agrarian revolution
and adopted a policy of outright opposition to state-sponsored reform, which
they believed (not without some justification) to be mere eyewash1. Since early
1990s, however, certain sections of them shifted to a complex course of “critical
engagement with the State” on the land reform front and they were joined
by other pro-reform movements as well as NGOs. Rather than going into the tactical-strategic
debates among the now splintered Filipino communists or their achievements and
weaknesses, let us look at the overall scenario with particular reference to
ruling class strategies (at state and individual levels) to cope with a situation
where land reform becomes unavoidable for both political (countering revolution
with reform and assimilating the forces of radical democracy) and economic (investment
and growth) purposes.
Under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP), a private owner can
retain land up to 5 acres plus 3 acres for every qualified heir (aged 15 years
or more), but such lands are subject to tenancy reform for ensuring security
of tenancy. Lands above that limit — barring certain exceptions —
are to be acquired by the state. The landlord is paid a “just compensation”,
calculated on the basis of land productivity, tax declaration etc., by the state
— partly in cash, partly in state bonds. The peasant beneficiaries pay
back to the state on the basis of “affordability”. The gap between
“just compensation” and “affordable price” is subsidized
by the government.
Basically, there are four modes of private land acquisition and re-distribution.
First, there is “voluntary-offer-to-sell” or VOS where the landlord
on his own hands over his land to the state and in appreciation for this good
gesture, the cash component of the compensation payable to him is increased
by 5 per cent with a corresponding 5 per cent decrease in the bonds component.
Second, there is “Voluntary Land Transfer” or VLT, where landlords
directly transfer land to peasants under mutually agreed terms, the government’s
role being reduced to information provision and contract enforcement. Thirdly,
for landlords who do not opt for VOS or VLT, Compulsory Acquisition or CA is
applicable, which is essentially same as the Marcos-era “Operation Land
Transfer” or OLT. Fourth, for corporate farms there are a few joint venture
options to be discussed later.
Let us now take stock of actual accomplishments. By the end of 1999, little
progress was made in tenancy reform, whereas a total of 4.84 million hectares
of land (47 per cent of the total farmland) where redistributed. Of this, almost
half was contributed by OLT and CA taken together, mainly the latter. This demonstrates
the overwhelming weight of compulsory acquisition. What is more, the threat
of CA forced many an anti-reform landlord to willy-nilly opt for VOS in return
for better terms of compensation (i.e., 5 per cent higher cash component); and
the VOS category accounted for another 23 per cent of land redistribution. The
remaining 27 per cent is mostly contributed by VLT, a category suspected to
be “fake redistribution” in the majority of cases.
Period-wise, about 70 per cent of the redistribution was achieved between 1992
and 1999, whereas the Aquino period (1986-92) had accomplished less than 28
per cent. The importance of enhanced pro-reform initiative from below is thus
quite clear.
As elsewhere, land reform in the Philippines suffers from all sorts of loopholes.
The Agrarian Reform Committees (ARCs) formed at the village (or cluster of small
villages) level to aid farm and beneficiary development are fund-constrained
and poorly managed. There is no dearth of reversals, such as beneficiaries not
getting possession of land in the face of landlord opposition, cancellation
of land ownership awards by the state on dubious grounds, and so on. Even by
official figures, at the end of 1999 as much as 75,000 and 90,000 hectares of
land were affected by the two last-mentioned problems. Critics have also pointed
out that more than two-thirds of CARP accomplishments pertain to government-owned
and public lands, which means that reform has focused on easier targets. However,
it should be noted that unlike in many Latin American countries, public lands
here (as in India) are in many cases under cultivation and private control of
landlords, who even exact rent from the cultivators. Redistribution of such
lands therefore constitutes an important, and often quite contentious, component
of land reform.
World Bank activities on the reform scene range from providing “infrastructure
and other support services” to consultancy services on “objective
decision making, programme monitoring” etc. Its main emphasis will be
self-evident from these words of the WB Country Director: “…the
key challenge is to closely link the best elements of the ‘market- assisted’
model and put them firmly into the Filipino context of CARP.” (Bhargava,
2000)
As for plantations, sugar haciendas have largely been able to avoid reforms
thanks to owners’ political clout and other factors. The most modernized
banana and other high value crops, on the other hand, were allowed a 10-year
reprieve, which ended on June 1998. During this period, companies were required
to pay the workers 5 per cent of annual gross sales and 10 per cent of net profit.
Most companies cheated the workers by manipulating accounts and utilized the
grace period to retrench union leaders and others. In ten years, about 20,000
farm workers were thus put out of employment, and they are now on the forefront
of the struggle for land redistribution.
MNCs have generally been anti-reform, but not always. For one, some near-bankrupt
plantations (mainly rubber), preferred to cash in their lands via the VOS option.
In certain other cases, they abandoned their alliance with local landed elites
and utilized the reform to directly exploit the producers. In fact, CARP provisions
for corporate farms leave them enough leeway to cheat the peasants. Take for
instance the “Stock Distribution Option” (SDO) where farm-workers
are given land titles, which are then treated as equity shares (stock) in the
company. The trick here is to undervalue land and overvalue machinery and other
assets so that ‘beneficiaries’ get reduced share of profit. Family
members and cronies of presidents and ex-presidents are notorious for such controversial
deals. Moreover, the farmworkers can lose their land in the event of the company
going bankrupt.
Two other options available to corporates are: (1) leaseback (comparable to
pre-reform corporate farms in our country) where redistributees lease out their
lands on long terms with meagre lease rentals and in some cases also get one
job per family on the farm; and (2) contract farming where peasant beneficiaries
are bound by contract to produce and deliver a particular crop of a particular
grade, which they cannot sell in the open market. Generally speaking, leaseback
is the preferred choice of local landed elites, whereas MNCs are fond of the
latter option.
Lessons we can draw
As the experience in both Brazil and the Philippines shows,
the state is compelled to intervene only under the pressure of militant, broad-based
movements covering, along with land, many other social and economic issues.
Even official land reform projects then become a theatre of class struggle,
with the exploiters struggling not simply to avoid reform provisions, but also
to use these to their advantage; and the exploited striving to expand the scope
of reform as far as practicable. Redistribution per se do not give rise to independent
peasant farming or loosen the grip of bourgeois-landlord classes and MNCs over
agriculture; in fact their control over produce, credit and input markets tend
to become stronger. Implementation of state-sponsored reform, however partial
and superficial, opens up new vistas for class struggles (e.g., in post-reform
plantations), even as the people’s forces continue their struggle to force
through reform in new areas.
The situation in the Philippines may not be quite comparable to ours. But it
may serve as an important reference point because in many ways it betokens the
basic orientation of Third World governments’ agrarian policy evolution.
Perhaps more directly encouraging for us are the massive demonstrations, selective
seizure of estates and forcible occupation of barren lands in Brazil. Of course,
there are encouraging instances of land struggles nearer home — e.g.,
on the other side of Punjab, where tens of thousands of tenants in state-owned
farms are up in arms against Musharraf’s military regime with a simple,
straightforward slogan: “maliki ya maut” -- ownership or death!
So in the Third World, land reform lives. Even where expunged from the official
agenda, it reappears the moment an opportunity presents itself. In Indonesia
for example, in 1999, the peasants in Tapos (Java) recaptured vast tracts of
land they had captured back in the 1940s, but lost after the bloody coup of
1965. One of Suharto’s sons then got the whole area converted into a cow
ranch; now in 1999 peasants reconverted it into cultivable land and got it redistributed
amongst themselves.
In the context of such global trends, what does the India scene look like? Part
of the picture – our experience in land struggles – has recently
been documented in the Political-Organisational Report of our Seventh Party
Congress; let us now turn to the other part.
Reverse Reform in India
Ours is the country that has passed the highest number of
land reform laws in the whole world. But it is also a country where big landlords
and kulaks share state power with the big bourgeoisie. The net result is that
less than two per cent of total cultivated area (less than one per cent in each
state if Kerala, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir are set aside) has been redistributed
(Appu, 1996). In fact, the Gini coefficient for distribution of ownership holdings
declined slightly between 1960-61 and 1970-71 but remained almost static (rising
very slightly) thereafter, whereas the Gini coefficient for distribution of
operational landholdings rose steadily, albeit slowly, throughout the period
between 1960-61 and 1991 (Ramachandran, 2000).
In plain language, even before the initiation of so-called “structural
reforms” in the 1990s, land reform in India failed to break the existing
concentration of land ownership or to arrest the growing concentration of operational
holdings (reverse tenancy). And with the initiation of those “structural
reforms”, a new direction was started to be given to the agrarian policy.
Actually the beginnings were made even earlier. The VP Singh government appointed
a Standing Advisory Committee on Agriculture headed by Sharad Joshi. The Shetkari
Sangathana leader called for a radical break with what he called the “neo-colonial
food policy” pursued since independence, and came up with an export-oriented
“agrarian policy”. Some of the Standing Committee’s recommendations
were: abolition of all subsidies at the level of production, divorcing agricultural
production from the regime of “statism and welfarism”, maximum possible
export and easier import of agricultural machinery and equipments. It was exactly
in the same spirit that the Agricultural Policy Resolution of the next Congress
government was drawn up. Presented by Balram Jakhar in 1992, it went ahead with
recommendations like “freeing” the cooperative movement from state
control, developing agro-processing units, export promotion, special thrust
to irrigated horticulture, floriculture, etc. While Jakhar had to maintain the
old Congress rhetoric of land reform, the BJP government in 1998 actually began
discussions on releasing land ceiling and tenancy laws. But agriculture being
a state subject, the real work of jettisoning old land reform laws had to be
done by the state governments. And the three governments which took the lead
in this respect during 1993-95 once again represented the three major political
formations of the ruling classes: the Congress in Maharashtra, the Janata in
Karnataka, and the BJP in Gujarat. The counter-reform measures initiated by
them were broadly similar, so let us concentrate on one of them.
In Karnataka, the reversal of land reform was effected by the Karnataka Land
Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1995 and the New Agrarian Policy (NAP) simultaneously
adopted by the state government. The former raised the ceiling from a range
of 10 to 54 acres (for irrigated double-cropped land and dry land respectively)
to a range of 40 to 216 acres. Leasing had been banned in the state, now it
was legalised for certain cases – e.g., “aquaculture” (a new
item added to the definition of agriculture with an eye on shrimp culture in
the coastal belt) without any ceiling “for a period not exceeding 20 years”.
Conversion of agricultural land was allowed for a number of specific purposes
(industry, education, places of worship, housing, etc.) within specified limits.
For instance, plots up to 108 acres of dry land or 20 acres of irrigated land
were now permitted to be converted for industrial use; moreover, the state government
was given overriding powers to “exempt” to any extent land for any
specific purpose” – in “public interest”. The NAP proposed
a policy of encouraging private investment in seed technology, research and
development, etc., and permitted long-term leases for these purposes. It proposed
withdrawal of subsidies on fertilisers, canal water and electricity and also
of concessions to the poor matters of interests and loans.
Continuing the liberalisation drive, the BJP government at the centre introduced
in 2000 its new agricultural policy wedded to corporatisation, industrialisation
(e.g., food processing) and commercialisation (with emphasis on diversification
and export promotion). All incentives were reserved exclusively for these priority
areas, the remaining support to small and middle farmers were withdrawn, and
the positionof the latter was rendered all the more precarious by the removal
of quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports, which pushed them into
the face of sharpened competition on the market. Foreign and Indian corporate
houses like Pepsi, the Cargill/Hindustan Lever Ltd. Group, the Eagle Industries,
etc. began to be seen and supported as the main locomotives of agricultural
development.
More than direct legislations (as in Karnataka), it is this overall environment
or policy regime which is now having the effect of re-concentration of ownership
and operational holdings by economic means. In fact a broad consensus has evolved
among all the ruling parties – including the regional ones – around
the neo-liberal agenda in agriculture; and it would be interesting to see how
the ‘natural rulers’ of West Bengal joined and contributed to this
process in their own subtle way.
Both “Operation Barga” (OB) and redistribution of land – the
two components of land reform in this state – were all but abandoned in
the 1990s. Security of tenure achieved through OB (registration of bargadars,
i.e., sharecroppers, and making eviction illegal) was expected to be followed
up by transfer of ownership rights to the poor tenants – as was done in
Karnataka under Devraj Urs and also in Taiwan and South Korea (see below) –
but the government doggedly refused all such suggestions. With the CPI(M) identifying
more and more with the rich and upwardly mobile middle peasants, evictions reappeared
on the scene. According to a status report released by the state government
in 2002, over 13 per cent of those who had been allotted land under the redistribution
programme have been dispossessed and 3.02 per cent of registered sharecroppers
have been evicted.
The Left Front Government (LFG) also made an attempt to introduce the World
Bank inspired model of market-based reform. It mooted the idea of a land bank
corportation which would provide easy credit to tenants willing to purchase
the plots they till. But the project remained a non-starter. Meanwhile, the
landowners themselves devised a rural equivalent of silver handshake, where
the recorded bargadars gives up his legal rights as a tenant in return for a
small part of the land or a paltry sum of money. Although this is illegal, the
CPI(M) leaders have found a new pasture in brokering such deals. The new approach
found expression in the CPI(M)’s updated party programme too, where the
land redistribution clause was watered down by deleting the provision that land
would be confiscated without compensation.
Finally in 2002 the CPI(M) bigwigs in the ministry tried to completely reshape
the LF’s agrarian policy in accordance with the recommendations (e.g.,
corporate farming) of American consultancy firm McKinsey. The scheme had to
be kept in abeyance in the face of strong opposition from within and without
the CPI(M) and other front partners, but some of the essential elements of the
McKinsey report and of the agrarian policy of BJP and Congress governments –
such as industrialisation, commercialisation, MNC-involvement and export orientation
– have already replaced land reform as the key concerns of the LFG too.
The government justifies this by claiming that land reform has already been
completed in the state, whereas the fact is that only 8 per cent of the total
cultivable area in the state has been redistributed so far as ceiling surplus
land, with about 60 per cent of this being achieved before the LF came to power
in 1977.(2)
Like West Bengal, other state governments too are devising ingenious ways of
reversal of land reform and corporatisation of agriculture. In Tamil Nadu, a
total of 25.74 lakh hectares have been earmarked as wastelands to be acquired
and leased out to corporate houses and others under the Comprehensive Wasteland
Programme. Already more than 1,500 applications have been received, including
those from giants like Reliance, ITC, TVS, etc. While the old Land Ceiling Act
(which stipulates a limit of 15 standard acres) is still in place, the new scheme
allows up to 1,000 acres – and this is liable to be released in “exceptional
cases” – in 30-year leases. Most shockingly, vast tracts currently
being cultivated and/or inhabited by dalits, adivasis and others have been classified
as wastelands (Vishwanathan, 2003). In Maharashtra, the government is acquiring
land earlier allotted to tenants and the landless in and around forests, all
in the name of protection of environment (Lobo, 2002).
Putting the Cart Before the Horse
To return to the central government policies, the reversal
of land reforms is accompanied by growing apathy towards agriculture (in the
conventional sense) and the direct producers. Not only poverty alleviation programmes
like IRDP have been severely curtailed or abandoned, public investment in rural
infrastructure and irrigation have gone down and so has rural credit advanced
by commercial banks. The 2003 budget proposals have been criticised even by
NDA partners and the RSS for doing nothing to improve declining growth rates
in this sector. It seems Indian policy makers are working under the impression
that ‘old’ agriculture and ‘sunset’ industries have
outlived their utility and that our development goals must now be take care
of by (a) complete reshaping of agrarian policy as discussed above and (b) rapid
growth in IT-related sectors.
The first illusion is already getting shattered by our continued dismal performance,
but the second one draws sustenance from appreciable progress in certain segments
like software development, call centres etc. It is boasted that in ICTs (information
and communication technologies) India has even surpassed China. In the overblown
enthusiasm are forgotten two basic constraints which make the present boom entirely
dependent on foreign orders and renders its sustainability highly doubtful:
(i) backwardness in hardware manufacture and (ii) the ominous digital divide,
i.e., the very low penetration of ICTs in Indian society (about one-fifth of
what obtains in China). While state governments vie with one another for wooing
IT majors and for creating an IT-friendly environment, the basics are always
bypassed. The Economic Times drew attention to this when Chandrababu Naidu declared
that 10,000 new seats would be created in the engineering colleges in Andhra
Pradesh: “As the number of these seats increases, there is a need for
an even more rapid expansion in the number of aspirants for these seats. Without
an increase in the demand for the seat, those institutions will have to make
do with students who are not quite the best. This will in turn affect the quality
of the IT-professionals they produce. And the required growth in the number
of high calibre will not be possible if a large section of the population remains
outside the educational mainstream. The sustained growth of the IT industry
thus requires an end to not just the digital divide but also the larger divide
in the education.” (“ABC before IT”, 2 February, 2002)
And overcoming this general educational divide, the author of these lines forgot
to add, is largely a function of narrowing the great divide in land ownership.
This is borne out by even a cursory comparison between, say, Andhra Pradesh
and Kerala (DN, 2002).
To hope that the “new economy” and “globalisation” plus
the current fad of “structural reform” will pull India out of backwardness
is to expect that the cart will move faster if it is fitted ahead of the horses.
This is not to be. Right from the classic cases of England and France to the
more recent success stories in Asia, abolition of feudal/semi-feudal land relations
have acted as the basic point of departure for modernisation and development.
Flashback: Behind Asian Success Stories
Massive US aid is usually recognised as the main thing, which
enabled countries like South Korea (SK) and Taiwan take advantage of special
post-war conditions and achieve very rapid growth. But the Americans also saw
to it that the dollars are put to good use and the first thing they did was
to force these states undertake thoroughgoing land reforms. Such reforms were
initiated in SK (as also in Japan) by the US military government, which took
charge immediately after World War II, and in Taiwan by the Chiang government
according to plans drawn up by Wolf Ladejinsky, the land reform advisor to US
military authorities. The similarities in the land reform programmes in these
countries are thus not just accidental.
In Taiwan, following tenure reforms (which included rent reduction, compulsory
registration of all rent contracts and security of tenure) the Kuomintang government
embarked upon an elaborate redistribution programme. First, land abandoned by
the Japanese after the war were sold out in small parcels approximately 1 chia
(= 0.97 hectare) at a price equal to 2.5 times the value of the annual output
of the main crop. Payment was in kind and spread over 10 years. This meant that
the annual payment amounted roughly to 25 per cent of the harvest, well below
the usual rate of rent. Second, the government bought up landlords’ land
in excess of 3 chia per household and resold these to the tenants at the rate
and in the manner mentioned above. By these two methods, a total of nearly 48
per cent of the cultivated area was redistributed.
The US military administration in SK also began with tenure reforms as in Taiwan.
The civilian government installed in 1948 went ahead with a series of land redistribution
measures. The most important measure was the acquisition of all lands exceeding
3 hectares per household as well as lands (any size) owned by absentee landlords
and selling these in small parcels. The compensation paid to landlords and the
price paid by erstwhile tenants (or other landless/land-poor peasants) both
amounted, on average, to 1.5 times the average annual output payable over 5
years. The whole process was administered by local land committees (the equivalent
of farm tenancy committees in Taiwan), which acted as centres of peasant mobilisation.
Tough enforcement provisions were introduced, including confiscation of lands
from landlords who attempted to evade the law.
In both Taiwan and SK (as in Japan) land was very scarce, while rents and the
incidence of rural poverty were very high – much like the present Indian
conditions. After reforms, roughly 90 per cent of peasants in SK (also in Japan,
which implemented similar reforms) and about 83 per cent of their counterparts
in Taiwan became owners of all, or major parts of, the land they cultivated.
Of course, many gaps remained in the actual implementation of land reform, giving
rise to popular struggles during the reform years and after. The SK witnessed
a “summer of protest” as late as in 1987, when farmers in the North
Cholla province agitated against the Samyang Corporation’s illegal ownership
of tenanted land, which should have been distributed among the tenants way back
in 1949.
Lacunae notwithstanding, the land reforms led to a big boost in productivity
(in Taiwan, for example, total agricultural production grew at an average rate
of 5 per cent per annum between 1952 and 1964) and an appreciable decline in
poverty levels. The home market expanded, a better foundation was laid for industrialisation,
and a good share of the world market was also grabbed. Like others, these countries
too were not free from problems, but that does not negate their remarkable achievement
within bourgeois limits.
Land Reform: Urgent and Indispensable
The experiences of Asian ‘tigers’ and ‘cubs’
– and certainly of China too – show that we cannot just skip land
reform and jump over the stage of IT-led growth.(3) To lay a proper foundation
for that, like them India must first weed out the (semi-) feudal land relations
which not only obstruct the free flow of capital into agriculture, but also
suppress the effective demand for agricultural, industrial and service sector
products and thereby hinder growth in the economy as a whole. But this simple
and basic truth is purposefully held back from the people by the policy makers
representing the ruling classes, their social-democratic collaborators and (neo-)
liberal intellectuals, all working in tandem. We must therefore launch a powerful
counter propaganda to bring land reform back into focus – not as some
remote ideal, but as an urgent necessity, as the only key to sustainable development,
genuine social justice and effective empowerment of the deprived billions.
The present political milieu provides us with a good enough opportunity to build
up public awareness on this question. Already there is widespread criticism
regarding the government’s failure to tackle the deepening agrarian crisis;
we can and must intervene in the debate to show that the crisis stems not simply
from the WTO-dictated neo-liberal policies but, at a more fundamental level,
from the strategy of “building on the best” (read relying on landlords
and kulaks) pursued so far – and that only a radical reversal of the entire
policy package can get the nation out of the impasse. The campaign should also
cover related demands like comprehensive legislation for agrarian labourers,
and must be based on a powerful grassroots movement for land and wages, for
social dignity and people’s democracy. Such combined campaigns from above
and from below do have the power to force land reforms on the national political
agenda – as Indian communists have proved in the past, and as our comrades
in countries like Brazil and the Philippines are demonstrating at present.
NOTES
Almost all the informations on the Philippines, Brazil, South
Korea and Taiwan have been taken from different articles brought together in
“Power in the Village”, a compilation of papers submitted at the
International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development held in Tagaytay
City, Philippines, in December 2000, edited by Horacio R. Morales Jr., James
Putzel, et el and published by the Project Development Institute.
1. “The Philippine Example : People’s War led by the Communist Party
of the Philippines”, a paper submitted on behalf of the Central Committee
of CPP in the International Conference on Socialism in the 21st Century held
in Kathmandu in November 2000, and the latest such document available on the
CPP website, note :
“Land reform in still the most important mass campaign in the countryside
… Untill now, the minimum land reform program of land rent reduction and
elimination of usury is being carried out … The maximum land reform program
of land confiscation and free distribution of land to the tilers shall be undertaken
at the appropriate time … we have studied and drawn lessons from instances
of premature confiscation of land in our own experience and from the peasant
uprisings in Aria from the 1920s to the Naxalbari movement in the late 1960s
and early 1970s …” (Reproduced here from “Proceedings”
of the said Kathmandu conference published by Madan-Ashrit Memorial Foundation,
Kathmandu, Nepal).
2. For more on Land Reform in West Bengal, see “Myth and Reality: Agrarian
Scene in Left Ruled Bengal, 1997-2002” by Arindam Sen, Liberation Publications.
3. Latest reports have it that China is all set to overtake India even in software
development, call centres etc. in a matter of half a decade or so.