AGRARIAN REFORM IN MEXICO: AN INTERPRETATION

Albania's radical agrarian reform.

The agrarian reform in Albania included free distribution of land to rural households and the complete break up of the former collective and state farms. These key features of the Albanian reform are in sharp contrast with other Central and Eastern European countries. Our paper explains the choice of the Albanian agricultural privatization and land reform process and the radical decollectivizat...

Whither agrarian reform in South Africa?

Agrarian Change and Privatization of Ejido Land in Northern Mexico

This paper uses the findings of a 1999 case study of ejidos (collective landholdings) in the Yaqui Valley, Sonora, a prominent agricultural region of northwest Mexico, to examine responses to a series of economic and legal reforms enacted as part of Mexico’s ‘Reform of the Countryside’, which began in the late 1980s. In particular, it analyses reactions to the 1992 amendment to Article 27 of Me...

Political Conditions for Agrarian Reform and Poverty Alleviation

The purpose of this piece is to explore how we might go about understanding the political conditions for poverty alleviation via agrarian reform. It argues that the traditional conceptualization of agrarian reform and its politics -which presents a near impossibility in typical political configurations -is too limiting. The traditional economic focus on intersection of landed rights, agricultur...

Agrarian reform and the ‘two economies’: transforming South Africa’s countryside

This chapter focuses on the rural dimensions of the ‘two economies’ debate, and in particular on the question of what contribution land and agrarian reform can make to reducing inequality and addressing the structural nature of rural poverty in post-apartheid South Africa. It suggests that the problem needs to be conceptualised in terms of an ‘agrarian question of the dispossessed’, that can on...