Reforming Land Rights: the World Bank and the Globalisation of Agriculture

Since independence, landholdings in Southern Africa have remained highly skewed between the rich and poor reflecting the land and agricultural policies adopted in colonial times and after independence. More recently agricultural policies have been prescribed by the World Bank as conditionalities of multilateral loans which have both facilitated and also driven the growing integration of such countries in the world economy. This article argues that such integration is being played out on an increasingly unequal global playing field, structured by global agricultural commodity chains and international trade, and strengthened by those very policy prescriptions of the World Bank. Instead of overcoming the dual economies and regulatory systems created in colonial times, people living in the region have only seen growing poverty and deepening inequality. This provides the context necessary for analysing the World Bank’s recently published policy position on land reform. It argues that the approach taken by the Bank does not address the structural reasons for the distortions of landholdings in the region, and moreover that such inequality is likely to be reaffirmed and reproduced by the Bank’s proposals. It further argues that the model of market-based land redistribution favoured by the Bank will be insufficient to dissipate the pressures of this ever-growing inequality. With considerations of ‘efficiency’ given prominence over other concerns, it concludes that the Bank’s policies are unlikely to meet both of its overarching goals of poverty reduction and growth.