This December representatives from peasant movements around the world will gather together with each other and with specialists in land reform policies, at the World Forum on Agrarian Reform, to be held in Valencia, Spain. On the top of their agenda will be debunking the hype emanating from the World Bank on the topic of land reform, and organizing a global campaign to fight the pernicious impacts of the Bank's land policies. In fact, recent shifts in World Bank policies toward land might remind one of the title 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 of course logical, since when the majority of a country's population are essentially excluded from the nation's economy, broad-based economic growth is impossible. That is no news to those who have studied the issue for decades, except that as a result, the World Bank now claims to favor 'land reform' to address this common situation found in many countries. Unfortunately, what the Bank means by the phrase 'land reform' is a far cry from what organizations 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 land holdings of the super-rich and their redistribution to the landless poor. It has not truly recognized what is clear to most people: that bloated land holdings for a few in the midst of the poverty of many is morally wrong and makes development impossible. Rather the Bank is using the rhetoric of land reform to push for 'facilitating markets in land,' where land is to be bought and sold like merchandise, despite the fact that peoples' livelihoods are at stake. To this end the Bank has pushed policies to privatize public lands, and 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 typically been disastrous, with mass desperation sell-offs by the poor, renewed waves of land concentration by the wealthy, and the deeper immiseration of the rural majority. The World Bank has also pushed a 'land bank' strategy on a number of countries, where the very poor are induced to take out high interest loans to buy the poor quality land that wealthy landlords want to sell, at so-called 'market' prices, which often are many times the real value. This amounts to a give away of tax dollars to wealthy landlords in exchange for worthless, low fertility land. The debt burdens the so-called beneficiary families have to take on are impossible to overcome in most cases, given the poor productivity of the land they acquire, and the cost of this type of 'land reform' is so prohibitive – as the very existence of the program causes inflation of land prices – that it is not practical in any case. The term 'ugly' we reserve for the fact that the World Bank targets land bank programs at countries where grassroots 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 depoliticize 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 movements. 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. * Peter Rosset is co-coordinator of the Land Research Action Network (http://www.landaction.org) and is a member of the organizing committee for the World Forum on Agrarian Reform to be held in Valencia, Spain, on December 5-8, 2004 (http://www.fmra.org/index_uk.html).