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.
REFERENCES
Appu, PS (1996): “Land Reforms in India: A Survey of Policy, Legislation and Implementation”, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi.
Ramachandran, VK (2000): “Agrarian Reforms and Rural Development in India: A Note” in “Power in the Village”, op. cit.
Vishwanathan, S (2003): “Tamil Nadu: Land Reforms in Reverse?”, Frontline, March 14, 2003.
Lobo, Brian (2002): “Maharashtra Land Reforms: Turning the Clock Back”, EPW, February 9, 2002.
D.N. (2003): “Breaking the Deadlock: Land Reform Revisited”, EPW, June 29, 2002.