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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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