AGRARIAN REFORM AND THE

POLITICS OF RURAL CHANGE

MEMBERS: ARNANTA || GARCIA || MORE

DS 125 International Aspects of Philippine and

Third World Development

3. Moderate Reformism introduced by the national governments anxious

to garner peasant support and maintain political tranquility

Rising rural literacy rates or, especially, the aboli-tion of literacy requirements for voting has enfran-chised a growing number of peasants, creating a large voting bloc supporting rural reform

LIMITS OF AGRARIAN REFORM

1. Less than one-third of rural families in need received any land. Most beneficiaries found that their added land was insufficient to alleviate their deep poverty.

2. As in most LDCs, the nation’s economic structure has favored the urban population over the peasantry.

3. Most agrarian reform programs exist in name only. 4. Revolutionary agrarian reforms have limitations

as well. * Each nation’s agrarian-reform package must be carefully designed to meet its own specific needs.

OTHER APPROACHES AND ISSUES

1. Crop Pricing Price controls are imposed by many governments

to ensure a supply of cheap food for the urban population. By holding crop prices below the free-market levels, these controls have further impoverished peasant .

Lifting price controls leads to sharply higher pric-es of basic foods. Consequently, when officials re-move them, often in response to external pres-sures from IMF or WB, they often face protests or even riots by irate, urban consumers.

2. Integrated Rural Development This involves some combi-nation of technical assistance for farmers, greater peasant access to credit, better access to mar-kets, improved irrigation, crea-tion of alternative sources of income, improved educational opportunities and better health care.

A manifestation of this approach is the United Na-tions Millennium Development Goals.

DEMOCRACY AND RURAL REFORM

For decades, Third World development policies have emphasized industrial growth and urban modernization often to the detriment of the rural sector. The consequences have been stagnant agricultural production, growing food imports, rural poverty, heavy rural-urban migration and proletarianization of peasants.

Most far-reaching land reforms were implemented by revolutionary regimes rather than democratic governments.

At present democratic countries, landlords have formed powerful interest groups and have become influential in a number of major political parties, enabling them to block meaningful reform.

Since 2002, substantial increase in food prices caused extensive malnutrition in many LDCs and gave rise to food riots and other forms of violent unrest.

To resolve this, efforts are made by private and international institutions.

However, respected NGOs such as Oxfam International had the following criticisms for these efforts:

inadequacy of $20 billion

poor records of pledges of G8 countries

government corruption in the Third World

bias on political connections of foreign assistance

REFERENCE Handelman, H. (2010). Challenge of Third World

Development: International Edition. New Jersey, United States: Pearson Education.

D espite the substantial urbaniza-tion in recent decades, rural residents still constitute close

to 60% of the Third World population.

Unfortunately, it is in the countryside where some of the worst aspects of political and economic underde-velopment prevail. Wide urban-rural gaps persist in liter-

acy, health care, and life expectancy.

The most difficult and important challenges facing most developing nations:

1. Resolving the political and economic tensions between urban and rural areas

2. Reducing the vast inequalities within the countryside

RURAL CLASS STRUCTURES

I. At the apex of the rural class system stand the large and powerful landowners, sometimes known as the oligarchy.

II. On the rung beneath the landed elite, we find midsized landlords and more affluent peasants (sometimes called kulaks—consists of peasants who, unlike small landlords, still work on the land themselves; unlike small landlords, kulaks can afford to hire additional peasant labor to work with them).

III. At the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, the rural poor—including peasants who own small plots of land, tenant farmers, and farmworkers—are generally the Third World’s most impover-ished and powerless occupational group.

We may further subdivide poor peasants into two subgroups:

1. Those who own small amounts of land for family cultivation (smallholders)

2. Those who are landless—tenant farmers and farm wage laborers

* These categories are not mutually exclusive

PEASANT POLITICS

Despite their vast numbers, peasants often play a muted role in Third World politics. The peasant-ry’s political leverage is limited by poverty, lack of edu-cation, dependence on outsiders, and physical isolation from the centers of national power and from peasants elsewhere in the country.

Cultural values stressing caution and conserva-tism may further constrain peasant political behavior. This is because peasants typically are wary of radical change

and respectful of community traditions. To some extent, this

conservatism reflects a suspicion of outside values—distrust

frequently grounded in religious beliefs and other long-

standing traditions.

However, when peasants feel that their way of life is threatened, they will resist change or at least try to channel it into forms more beneficial to their interests. How effectively they engage in collective political action and how radical or moderate their demands are depend on a number of factors:

1. The extent to which they perceive themselves to be exploited

2. How desperate their economic condition is 3. The degree of internal cohesion and cooperation

within their communities 4. Their ability to form political linkages with peas-

ants in neighboring villages or in other parts of the country

5. The extent to which they forge political ties with non-peasant groups

6. The type of outside groups with whom they ally 7. The responsiveness of the political system to

their demands 8. The types of political actions that the political

order affords them

Whatever their political inclinations, the peasants’ economic and political concerns usually revolve around four broad issues:

1. The price they receive for their crops

2. Consumer prices of goods they buy

3. Taxes

4. Availability of land

* The issue of land has been the most volatile and the most critical to the political stability of many Third World nations.

POLITICS OF AGRARIAN REFORM

Agrarian reform typically involves redistribution of farm-land from landlords to landless peasants or to smallhold-ers who need more land to support their families. In other instances, it entails distribution of public property, includ-ing previously uncultivated lands. Successful reforms re-

quire government credit, technical assistance, and improved

access to markets.

THE CASE FOR AGRARIAN REFORM

Given the powerful interests opposing land redistri-bution, supporters of agrarian reform have needed to defend their objectives on several grounds.

1. Social Justice and Equity 2. Political Stability 3. Productivity 4. Economic Growth 5. Environmental Preservation

TYPES OF AGRARIAN REFORM

1. Externally Imposed Reform implemented after foreign occupation

or pressure Ex. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea (East Asia)

3 Unique Conditions of East Asia that Contributed to the Success of Externally Imposed Reform:

a. Depth of American commitment to reform b. The enormous pressure that the Unit-

ed States could exert on those East Asian governments

c. Landowning elites in these countries were so weakened at the end of World War II that they were ill-equipped to defend their own interests

2. Revolutionary Transformation resulted from peasant-based revolutions While revolutionary reforms are generally more far-

reaching than any of the other approaches, peasants

have frequently been bitterly disappointed by the

way the government organized the new agricultural

units. Rather than break up the old landed estates

and distribute the small plots directly to needy peas-

ants (East Asian model), most Marxist regimes cre-

ated large collective or cooperative farms dominat-

ed by the state

Factors that Convinced Various Communist Regimes to Introduce Collective Farming:

a. A means of controlling the kind of crops that peasants grew and what they were paid for them

b. A means of controlling the peasants’ individu-alistic impulses and reorienting them toward the public good

c. A means to facilitate government delivery of social service (myth)