1 Land Reforms in Latin America : Ten Lessons toward a Contemporary Agenda

In reviewing the outcomes of 70 years of land reforms in Latin America, we arrive at the following ten lessons that give guidelines for future programs of access to land. Lesson 1: Latin American land reforms have generally been “incomplete” in that they have not provided beneficiaries with the prerequisites for competitiveness. As a consequence, they have had a poor record in solving the poverty problem. Lesson 2: Land use is generally only one element of pluriactive household strategies. Hence, optimum access to land should be endogenous to household choices as it depends upon idiosyncratic livelihood strategies. Lesson 3: There exists a multiplicity of paths of access to land that can be selected from and combined according to political feasibility and budgetary capacity, with expropriative land reform only one of them and usually not the easiest. Lesson 4. Opportunities for governments to negotiate the recuperation of lands to settle poor people remain vastly under-explored, even though they provide some of the most politically and budgetarily feasible approaches to land reform. Lesson 5. Expropriation based on the social functions of the land, the classical approach to land reform, remains an important option for many countries, but it should be pursued pro-actively to be effective. Lesson 6. When property rights are legitimate and formalized, access to land through assistance to purchase can offer attractive possibilities that deserve further experimentation to establish best practice. Lesson 7. Access to land through assistance to rental offers possibilities that have not been pursued and deserve urgent attention. Lesson 8. Land reform should be systematically imbedded in “new” approaches to rural development based on regional development and economic incorporation of the poor. Lesson 9: Land reform for social change has been effective in displacing traditional landed elites and achieving political control over peasants, but not in promoting the social incorporation of beneficiaries. Lesson 10: Many land reforms have remained inconclusive, and the path toward conclusion has in most cases been excessively tortuous and delayed, implying high efficiency and welfare costs. 1 Prepared for the World Bank's Latin American Land Policy Workshop, Pachuca, Mexico, June 14 2002