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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly -
World Bank Policy on Land
Peter M. Rosset, March 2003
Co-Director
Food First, The Institute for Food Development Policy
Contents
The Bank Discovers the Obvious
Recent shifts in World Bank policies toward land remind one of the old Clint Eastwood movie, The Good the Bad and the Ugly.
The good is that the Bank has discovered that when a country has a very inequitable distribution of land, and as a consequence poor people in rural areas lack access to productive resources, overall economic development suffers.
This is certainly not news to those who have studied the issues for decades, except that as a result, the World Bank now claims to favour land reform to address this common situation found in many countries.
The Bank Imposes Market Solutions on the Poor
Unfortunately, what the Bank means by the phrase land reform is a far cry from what organisations of the landless are calling for.
The bad, then is that the World Bank has not joined the global outcry for expropriation of the excessive landholdings of the super-rich and their redistribution to the landless poor.
Rather the Bank is pushing for facilitating markets in land, where land is bought and sold like merchandise, despite the fact poor peoples' livelihoods are at stake.
The Bank's Land Policies will tend to Increased Pauperisation of the Poor
To this end, the Bank has pushed policies to parcel out communal holdings into small plots with individual ownership titles that can be sold.
The result of placing access to land by poor and indigenous peoples at the mercy of market forces has generally been disastrous, provoking mass sell-offs out of desperation and a further deepening of misery.
The World Bank has also pushed a land bank strategy on a number of countries where the very poor are induced to take out loans to buy the poor quality land that wealthy landlords want to sell, at market prices.
The debt burden that the so-called beneficiary families have to take on are impossible to overcome in these cases, and the cost of this type of land reform is so prohibitive - as the very existence of the programme causes inflation in land prices - that it is not practical in any case.
The Bank's Endgame is to De-politicise Land Reform
The term ugly we reserve for the fact that the World Bank is targeting for land bank programmes those countries where grassroots social movements are most active and successful in occupying idle land - as in Brazil, where the Landless Workers Movement (MST) has placed land reform at the top of the agenda for national debate.
The World Bank tries to de-politicise the land issue in such cases, moving land reform out of the realm of politics and into the realm of the market, while it tries to undercut support for the most successful land reform movements.
The Bank's Strategy is to Undermine the Political Struggle for Land Reform
The tragedy is that the scale of landlessness is so great that only a solution from the realm of politics and political action can address its magnitude, while market-based approaches at best just nibble at the margins. By undercutting the political struggle for true land reform, the Bank pushes it ever farther out of reach - which perhaps has been their real goal all along.
Further Information
FoodFirst - The Institute for Food and Development Policy is a US-based member supported, non-profit people's think-tank and education-for-action centre.
Visit: www.foodfirst.org