Palais des Nations, Geneva
In the 1970’s, many governments committed themselves with good intentions
to realizing equitable distribution of land through its 'redistribution with
speed' and, to systematically monitoring progress in poverty reduction. They
also undertook 'to eliminate severe under-nutrition by the year 2000'.' Alas,
this unanimous commitment and enthusiasm was short-lived. Since the early 1980’s
there has been a sudden shift away from government-implemented redistributive
land reform towards reliance on the formal credit market and on landed property
transfer, freely negotiated in the open market.
Accordingly, the pro-social transformation and anti-poverty redistributive land
reform policy has been suddenly eclipsed and condemned. In devising policy prescriptions
that are tightly bound to aid and debt relief, international aid agencies and
donor countries have propagated in their policy packages, technical programmes
of agricultural credit and legal procedures for land transactions based on the
dominance of a private sector free from price control by the state. Accordingly,
poor peasants and landless workers wishing to purchase a piece of land have
to search for a willing seller, negotiate the sale price of land, and compete
with speculators and rich landowners to secure credit, and even bid at land
sale auctions.
For example Colombia's Law no. 160 of 1994 provides a mechanism for market-based
land transfers to reduce the very high inequality of land and income distribution
and the persistently high poverty level of 45 per cent in rural areas. Under
this scheme, potential buyers of land are granted 70 per cent of the sale price
and are grouped in project-like activities supported by the World Bank. According
to a study prepared by the UN/CEPAL, the programme has had very limited success
owing to high prices imposed by violent coercion from landlords and narcotics
dealers, the refusal of willing buyers to purchase land in any locality and
cumbersome bureaucracy. The study found also that most of the land buyers are
urban, that transaction costs are prohibitive for small peasants, and that 'transfers
of property rights through the existing market mechanisms have failed to shift
land from one [rich] group to another group [of poor peasants]'.
What is more significant in the propagation of land market reform is the shift
in development objectives and the constituent elements in the ordering of means
and ends. Whereas Redistributive Land Reform gives high priority to the rapid
reduction of poverty in rural areas, combined with the development of the abilities
of the beneficiaries, sponsors of land market based reform accord priority to
economic efficiency in the market-determined allocation of resources in order
to realize export-led agricultural growth. land market based reform policy supports
the freedom of the producer and of capitalists in the accumulation of land and
income, irrespective of adverse distributional consequences and effects on the
well-being of the poor. Although the advocates of this approach, express concern
over increasing poverty, they anticipate its eventual reduction by a sustained
all-round rise in average real income per head. Equitable distribution of growth
benefits is not a clear development objective. We believe that seeing land-market
reform only in narrow economic terms as an end in itself represents a set-back
in the progress made since the 1950s both in developing thinking and in the
realization of equitable rural development.
Since 1985, Brazil's land policy was proclaimed to pacify the millions of
discontented poor peasants and landless workers and, at the same time, to serve
the interests of influential landlords and multinationals. The October 1985
law typifies this strategy. Its Article 11 (section 1.5) intended to provide
1.4 million rural workers between 1985 and 1990 with landownership between 1985
and 1990 by way of distributing 40 million hectares of cultivable but unutilized
land, in units of 20 ha. on average. The affected farms are those which do not
serve 'the social function of land'. While the government was busy defining
'social function', conducting cadastral surveys and studying the legal procedures,
nothing happened about actual redistribution. Supported by NGOs, the rural workers
occupied the land in anticipation of ownership as promised by the politicians.
Violent confrontation between the occupants, on the one hand, and the police
and the landlords' paramilitary organizations on the other, resulted in hundreds
of deaths. Eventually, only a fraction of nearly 6 per cent of a total 1.4 million
landless workers received land.
The Brasilian government, according to the 1999 Pastoral letter of the Roman
Catholic Brazilian Bishops “has dedicated itself to addressing problems
as they arise, such as the land problem of occupations or "tension points",
and leading to the so-called "expropriation industry", in which the
price of land purchased by the government is inflated at the moment of the sale.
The logic of the economic model not only ignores the possibility of small scale
production, but forces this sector to disappear or reduces it to subsistence
level.
“The Landless Movement (MST) and the rural union movement, which organize
workers who want to work the land and are the only social movements with effective
social power, are gaining ground among workers and legitimacy in the
struggle to return to the countryside. There is also a novel approach within
the process as the grassroots movements are showing that they are capable of
organizing production in their camps and are integrating their agricultural
production in the industrial production. Before they had to depend on the insufficient
support of State agencies.
“But even with all this evidence Brazil’s government does not see the
link between agrarian reform and the problem of unemployment. A revealing fact
is seen in the ten points of the so-called war against unemployment offered
after the 10th March 1999 Cabinet meeting: There is not a single
word about agrarian reform. In relation to the issue of rural unemployment,
there is mention of theoretically reinforcing a programme to strengthen family
agriculture and support the fruit-producing industry, which is managed by the
giant companies…”
Madam Chair, we refer to the land tenure policies of only 2 countries, Colombia
and Brazil, to illustrate the obstacles to the right to development.
Without land people cannot support themselves, they are forced to leave their
land for cities where they live together in uninhabitable, often violent living
condition, without access to opportunities for education or adequate health
care.
The pattern of destruction caused by the shift from a redistributive land reform
to a land reform based on market prices is causing havoc throughout Africa,
Asia and The Americas.
We call upon the UN Commission on Human Rights :
- the Special Rapporteur on the right to development consider the issue of
land tenure and agrarian reform in his report to the Commission next year;
- to request the SubCommission to appoint one of its members to prepare a
working paper without financial implication on the question of land tenure
and agrarian reform.
