Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs

“…rural bias debate between Byres and Lipton (Kay 2009, 109-115) and which intersect with more specific arguments on the so-called ‘inverse relationship’ between farm size and productivity (see also Byres 2004, Bernstein 2010, Griffin et al 2002, Lipton 2009, Hazell et al. 2010, Wiggins et al. 2010).”

“…Asia and most other agricultural growth successes have occurred with steadily rising absolute numbers of rural and agricultural populations for extended periods of time, with Asia’s rural population only having begun to decline very recently (Bezemer and Hazell, 2006; Lipton, 2009, p. 100).”

“Unless they are disadvantaged by policy distortions in favor of large farms (Binswanger et al. 1995b), they will produce more efficiently than wage labor-based operations, which need to spend resources supervising workers (Allen and Lueck 1998, Binswanger and Deininger 1997, Lipton 2009).”

“Debates continue about the relative merits of large and small farms, their implications for labour absorption, rural livelihoods and growth in Africa’s farm sector (Lipton 2009; World Bank 2008; Collier and Dercon 2014; cf. Deininger and Byerlee 2011; Baglioni and Gibbon 2013).”

“While there is little evidence of significant recent changes in agrarian structure in land scarce countries (Lipton 2009), many land-abundant countries are characterized by rising investment in large-scale farming based on a nonfamily corporate model, a trend that can but need not be accompanied by…”

“An inversed farm size–productivity relationship is widely observed in developing Asian countries (Bardhan 1973; Sen 1975; Heltberg 1998; Lipton 2009; Hayami 2001, 2009), following the notion of “small is beautiful” initially observed by Chayanov (first published in Russia 1925, see Chaia_nov 1986).”

“While issues of agrarian reform, land and territory have been with us for much longer (Sobhan 1993, Rosset et al. 2006, Lipton 2009), this GV focuses on the past two decades of struggle, since the founding of LVC as a © 2013 Taylor & Francis 1Page 33 of this Grassroots Voices.”

“…ofMichael Lipton’s work over four decades has been the crucial role of productivity gains in small-farm agriculture for rural poverty reduction (Lipton, 1977, 2009; IFAD, 2001), there are many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries in which such productivity gains have stubbornly refused to…”

“2 1 Introduction Many studies have found an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in South Asia, indicating that small farms are more efficient than large farms (for example, Heltberg, 1998; Lipton, 2009).”

“In this version of land reform the major beneficiaries should be efficient, smallscale farmers, who are enabled by appropriate rural development policies to maximise returns of land and contribute to rural non-farm economic growth (Lipton 2009).”

“Lipton makes important points about the nature of the state in the Third World, and his arguments about the pro-poor effectiveness of land-to-the-tiller reforms have an obvious contemporary relevance (see also Lipton, 2009).”

“There is a huge literature on the definition of land reform, spawning prescriptive, descriptive, and purposive interpretations (see Lipton 2009: 323-330).”

“Note: The data for landholding inequality come from Lipton (2009), the Food and Agriculture Organization’s World Census of Agriculture, Brazil’s national statistics agency, Deininger and Squire (1996), and the US Agency for International Development.”

“Such programs account for 85% of all major land reforms since 1900 (Albertus 2015) and have affected roughly 1.5 billion people since World War I (Lipton 2009, 1).”

“At that time between 8.5 and 11 million rural workers remained landless (Lipton, 2009).”

“…effective policies – like land reforms but also nutrition and environmental policies – that are pro-poor, connecting community and household foodbased strategies with fair distribution schemes of property rights and a regulated access to natural resources (Lipton, 2009; Wahlqvist et al., 2012).”

“In fact, the IR has served as justification for land reforms in developing countries (Lipton 2009), and further serves to motivate a strategic focus on smallholders within agricultural development policy (Larson et al. 2014).”

“…form of regulation of land deals based on principles embedded in the constructs of good governance at both national and international levels, and aimed at protecting land owners rights in both a free market system and under customary law and traditional system in land transactions (Lipton, 2009).”

“One group of scholars tends to focus on insecurity of tenure as a major impediment to economic growth, recommending formal titling, emphasising reformist intentions and often referring to success stories in Asia (de Soto, 2000; Lipton, 2009: 8; Hanstad et al., 2007: 29).”

“…or at least correlate with, some other shared characteristics, ranging from low degree of farm intensification and commercialization, a subsistence orientation, low income, and higher yield per unit of land, to a policy preference for redis-tributive land reforms (Hazell et al. 2010; Lipton 2009).”

“19 In the five-fold categorization of developing countries of Lipton (2009), the average Gini for the 19 countries in his most unequal groups (I and II) can be computed as 0.82, using his data.”

“However, economic development in Spain by the 1930s perhaps had reached a level where there was no longer a clear inverse-relationship between farm size and land productivity, and capital requirements was becoming increasingly important (Lipton, 2009: 65)69.”

“Lipton (2009) reports changes between censuses for selected countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) (Table 1).”

“More recently, this initial focus has been expanded to also include the recognition of customary tenure and customary authorities and, in a number of countries, towards the registration—and thus formalisation—of customary rights both on a collective and on an individual basis (e.g. EU Task Force on Land Tenure, 2004;…”

“Lipton (2009) argues that land reform continues to be relevant in many societies.”

“…systems of these countries and in developing countries generally (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2002; the World Bank [WB], 2002; Deininger, 2003; Bonfiglioli, 2004; FAO, 2008a, 2008b; Nkonya et al., 2008; Lipton, 2009; Liniger, Studer, Hauert, & Gurtner, 2011; Byamugisha, 2013).”

“It is also true of the early stages of socialist land reform in China, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Cuba (Lipton 2010).”

“During 1955-2000 a billion people and nearly as many hectares were affected by land reform (Lipton, 2009).”

“According to Arezki et al. (2013), a debate underlying the rush draws on agricultural production structure that articulates the need for smallholder structure for poverty reduction initiatives (World Bank 2007; Lipton, 2009).”

“The inverse farm-size-productivity relationship (Lamb 2003; Lipton 2009) has shown that small-scale farmers invest more in labour intensive land management than large-scale farmers.”

“The negative relationship between productivity and farm size, first noted in Russia (Chayanov 1926) and India (Bardhan 1973; Sen 1975; Srinivasan 1972), has almost become a stylized fact in the literature (Eastwood et al. 2010; Lipton 2009).”

“Lipton (2009) argues that conventional land redistribution remains an important policy option in cases where massive unemployment exists in combination with highly inequitable land distributions.”

“The impacts stemming from the loss of public, common and collective land are both social and ecological (Lipton 2009; Lyimo 2011).”

“Moreover, the envisaged outcome behind land reforms targeted at securing land rights need to be poverty reduction and enhancing the food security among the rural poor (Lipton 2009), preventing potential “elite capture” which may defeat the purpose of securing land rights for smallholders.”

“Furthermore, by concentrating on cotton-growing districts, we control for the possibility that certain crops may exhibit more significant economies of scale than others (Meurs 2001; Lipton 2009).”

“Since 1992, economic concessions have been awarded to 65 companies, many with close connections to the ruling party (lipTon 2009).”

“Supporters of the value chain approach contend that smallholder physical productivity can meet or exceed large-scale productivity (Lipton 2009; Eastwood, Lipton, and Newell 2010; Carletto, Savastano, and Zezza 2013, Pinstrup-Andersen 2015), that significant amounts of smallholder income is…”

“Some books on land reform are Powelson (1988); Bernstein (2002); Rosset et al. (2006); Lipton (2009).”

“Consistent with World Bank (2007),Lipton (2009) and Arezki et al. (2013), the underlying rush needs to provide some guarantee for initiatives favouring smallholder structures of agriculture which are friendlier towards poverty alleviation.”

“The most important is the organized squatter acquisition by relatively large groups (Lipton, 2009), a phenomenon most found in Latin America.”

“4 Using land inequality as a proxy for wealth inequality may be criticised on the grounds that, if land is heterogeneous in terms of productivity, a competitive land rental market and free entry will lead to land inequality but no wealth inequality because lower-productivity land will be concentrated into larger holdi…”

“…countries with extreme land inequality (e.g. South Africa) tend also to have extreme income inequality, which makes poverty reduction harder by skewing growth away from the poor, and by reducing their political in fl uence (Binswanger-Mkhize, Bourguignon, and van den Brink 2009; Lipton 2009).”

“Various scholars have noted that the misgivings that prevail about small-scale farming influence land (reform) policies in many countries (Hughes, 2006; Scott, 1998), despite growing evidence of small holder productivity (Lipton, 2009).”

“However, poverty reduction and rural development may be less dependent on land reform, but rather on liberal macro-economic policies and access to health and education for larger population groups (Lipton 2009).”

“Such inequality has also been found to mitigate the poverty-reducing effects of existing growth, as assetimpoverished households commonly lack the capacity to make productive investments (Deininger & Squire, 1998; Lipton, 2009; Ravallion & Datt, 2002).”