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, agriculture and poverty needs broadening to incorporate technological change enabled by the biological revolution and the importance of ecological systems that support both agriculture and survival strategies of the poor. The traditional political focus on agrarian classes needs broadening to incorporate new social forces interested in the correlates of agrarian inequality and the social correlates of land-based inequality -“new social movements” and their domestic and international allies. The argument nevertheless reaffirms the importance of classic agrarian reform in its dual contributions to direct relief of poverty and democratizing effects which enable other pro-poor reforms to work more efficiently. The surest way to poverty reduction in most rural societies is reformation of the property system. Though there are other roads to government action to alleviate poverty, all are subject to distortions induced by inequality, a major component of which is skewed distribution of property. Asset redistribution also enables social democracy, and even populist distributive programs work better with social democracy than without. Social democracy is, however, not a direct policy choice; there is much historical contingency at work. A conundrum of land reform policy generally is that it is a statist project -as all policy is -and as such has often increased state power and patronage in ways that are inconsistent with reform objectives. Without reform of the state, its alleged beneficiaries are seldom the driving force and may become its victims. Yet it is agrarian reform, particularly in its expanded conceptualization, which enables more broadly based rural power vis-a-vis the state by changing the incentive structure of state operatives through altering the rural distribution of power. Thus, a policy agenda for pro-poor reform must retain elements of the venerable core of the agrarian project and yet recognize the potential of larger coalitions for the poor. These elements include environmental integrity and regeneration, women’s rights, human rights, cultural survival and democratization. This analysis is not meant to replace class with postmodernist identity politics, but rather to emphasize the reality of new coalitional possibilities.