The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Land Policies of the World Bank
22/11/2004
- Opinión
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).
https://www.alainet.org/pt/node/110904?language=es
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