Re-thinking agrarian reform | Land and territory for what?
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Land reform remains a critical issue globally, highlighted by international development bodies and nations alike. Despite decades of efforts, rural poverty persists, affecting two-thirds of the world’s poor. Access to productive resources, particularly land, is pivotal for rural livelihoods and poverty alleviation. Even with diversification, farming remains a significant income source for many rural poor. The World Bank and other institutions emphasize land access as crucial for equity and poverty reduction. However, systematic inclusion of agrarian reform in global poverty reduction strategies, like the Millennium Development Goals, remains inadequate. The need for land reform was underscored by the FAO-sponsored International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in 2006, reflecting ongoing challenges and policy discussions.
In this context, we are reproducing here an excerpt from the paper Re-thinking agrarian reform, land and territory in La Via Campesina, written by Peter Rosset for the Journal of Peasant Studies in 2013.
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The growing concern for the Mother Earth inside La Via Campesina (LVC) has in turn resonated with a questioning of why we want land and territory and how we use it; in other words, ‘Land for what?’, or ‘Territory for what?’ While many organizations in the early years of their struggles called for more credit, subsidized agrochemicals and machinery for peasants, that is becoming less true for LVC member organizations. Typically, agrarian movements that gained land through occupations and/or land reform from the State obtained poor quality, degraded land; land in which soil compaction and degradation are such that chemical fertilizers have little impact on productivity. This is land that can only be restored by agroecological practices to recover soil organic matter, fertility and functional biodiversity. Furthermore, many in the agrarian movements inside LVC, like the MST, began to ask what it means to bring ‘the model of agribusiness into our own house’. By that they refer to the natural tendency of landless peasants, who had previously been farm workers for agribusiness, to copy the dominant technological model of production once acquiring their own land.
Reproducing the agribusiness model on one’s own land – by using purchased chemicals, commercial seeds, heavy machinery, etc. – will also reproduce the forces of exclusion and the destruction of nature that define the larger conflict. There is an increasing search for alternatives by the grassroots membership of LVC member organizations, partly in response to the dramatic fluctuations of prices of petroleum-based inputs over recent years, putting these inputs largely beyond the reach of many peasant farmers.
Thanks to the gradual working out of this logic, and to the hard experiences of trying to compete with agribusiness on their terrain – that of industrial agriculture where who wins the competition is who has access to more capital, which is demonstrably not peasants who have recently acquired land – we can say today that, based on LVC’s series of agroecology encounters over the past five years, almost all LVC organizations now promote some mixture of agroecology and traditional peasant agriculture rather than the Green Revolution.
Both the discourse of farming in ways that protect the Mother Earth and the health of farmers and consumers, along with the practice of recovering traditional farming knowledge and making the transition to agroecological farming, are growing fast in LVC.
The question of ‘Land and territory for what?’ has another answer as well, which is also increasingly common, and that is land and territory for (re)constructing and defending community. Gaining access to one’s own land, and/or diversifying production, make it more possible for youth to stay on the farm, for some family members who had migrated to the city to return and engage in productive activities, and for reduced patriarchy inside the peasant families as more members of the family engage in productive activities on the farm and gain their own income sources and spaces of decision-making. This reintegration on the land, of the extended peasant family that has been atomized by forced modernization in the countryside, has been documented for land occupations and agrarian reform settlements in Brazil and for agroecological diversification away from monoculture in Cuba. Similarly, questions of how to organize physical space on land gained through land occupations, in order to favor community cohesion and continued political mobilization, are increasingly under discussion.
On the evolution of land occupations or ‘land reform from below’, a persistent problem with the tactic of land occupations has been the manner in which the media, governments and public opinion fixate on examples of land occupations tainted by corruption, in which the powerful manipulate and often pay the landless to occupy land in order to title it and pass it on behind-the-scenes to a patron. This tends to delegitimize land occupations as ‘invasions’, and can make it difficult for movements to mobilize support for the untainted, ‘legitimate’ land occupations that they engage in.
Not until the MST in Brazil raised land occupation to an art, or a science, with organizationally and ideologically well-prepared occupiers, did the image of land occupations begin a partial shift, as they were able to eliminate tainted occupations and, by preparing people well, ensure much lower rates of land abandonment after the successful creation of land reform settlements. The success of the MST has been widely noted inside LVC, and their methodology has diffused across national borders and continents as a result of exchanges of experiences.
Indra Lubis explains the continued centrality of land occupations for LVC. This ‘land reform from below’ is essential to give people the ‘small victories’ that are needed to sustain commitment to the larger struggle. It is also the most effective way to pressure governments to act on land reform laws that otherwise languish without implementation.
Over time, the discursive ‘enemy’ of peasants and object of protests has grown, from mostly large landlords to including the World Bank, transnational corporations and finally international financial capital.
In Brazil, for example, the land available for land reform and thus suitable for occupation has shifted dramatically in recent years as a result of the recent waves of capitalization of agribusiness. As unproductive large landholdings have become productive agribusiness export platforms, the argument used historically in the dispute for public opinion has lost its relevance. It no longer makes sense to argue about the essential unfairness of the majority of the land being in the hands of a few ‘who don’t even use it’, while millions who desperately need land have none at all. Today the MST increasingly targets occupations at agribusiness, and argues forcefully about the benefits for all of Society and for the environment of peasant agriculture producing food without agrotoxics. They contrast this with the damage wrought by large-scale industrial monoculture for export and agrofuels. This is mirrored in the overall evolution of LVC discourse against transnational corporations (TNCs) and financial capital, and toward the benefits of peasant and family farm agriculture for building food sovereignty, growing healthy food, slowing global warming and taking care of the Mother Earth.
Targeting transnational agribusiness backed by financial capital is raising the ante for LVC member organizations. In the case of Brazil, targeting feudal-style landlords brought repression in the form of hired gunmen, corrupt local judges and local police. But targeting TNCs increasingly brings private security forces and militarized federal police into play, along with increased juridical criminalization of struggle, and ever-increasing demonization of the struggle in the mass media. LVC organizations around the world are facing this more intense wave of criminalization, repression and media stigmatization.
Territory for whom?
LVC has been transformed by the internal and external dialogue with non-peasants who share rural territories, including landless laborers, indigenous people, forest dwellers, nomadic pastoralists, riverine and coastal peoples – particularly artisanal fisherfolk – and others. As a result, thinking has evolved from traditional forms of agrarian reform which, while they meant access to land for peasants, under certain conditions and circumstances also meant enclosure and loss of use rights for the non-sedentary farmer peoples that shared territories prior to ‘land distribution’. In the renewed vision, agrarian reform must take into account the needs of all of these actors, and should have mechanisms to ensure peaceful coexistence, perhaps modeled on traditional land use and common property resource systems. The challenge remains how to do this.
A related issue raised at Bukit Tinggi is the need to build alliances on the land issue, not just with other rural peoples, but with the urban poor as well. The financial speculation that drives rural land grabbing also drives urban real estate speculation, which leads to massive evictions of the urban poor. This could be the basis for rural-urban, agricultural-non-agricultural and North-South solidarity and joint struggle for what some might call ‘land sovereignty’, defined broadly as:
“…the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the benefits of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and landscape…”
This embraces struggles by indigenous movements, rural labourers, urban activists and social movements North and South who have sometimes been excluded by traditional land reform campaigns.
While the issues of women and land rights, and women as leaders in the struggle for land and the defense of territory, have been in the LVC since the earliest declarations, it was at the International Seminar on ‘Agrarian reform and gender’ hosted in 2003 in Cochabamba, Bolivia, by LVC and GCAR, that female and male peasant leaders from 24 countries had the opportunity to debate these issues and engage in the collective construction of visions and processes (Declaración de Cochabamba 2003, Monsalve Suárez 2006). Discrimination against women in past agrarian reform processes was discussed in depth, and the pernicious presence of patriarchy inside social movements for agrarian reform was hotly contested. Since then, these have been central issues inside LVC. At the V International Conference in Maputo, Mozambique, in 2008, LVC took on persistent patriarchy inside the movement:
“…All the forms of violence that women face in our societies – among them physical, economic, social, cultural and macho violence, and violence based on differences of power – are also present in rural communities, and as a result, in our organizations. This, in addition to being a principal source of injustice, also limits the success of our struggles. We recognize the intimate relationships between capitalism, patriarchy, machismo and neo-liberalism, in detriment to the women peasants and farmers of the world. All of us together, women and men of La Via Campesina, make a responsible commitment to build new and better human relationships among us, as a necessary part of the construction of the new societies to which we aspire… We commit ourselves anew, with greater strength, to the goal of achieving that complex but necessary true gender parity in all spaces and organs of debate, discussion, analysis and decision-making in La Via Campesina, and to strengthen the exchange, coordination and solidarity among the women of our regions. We recognize the central role of women in agriculture for food self-sufficiency, and the special relationship of women with the land, with life and with seeds. In addition, we women have been and are a guiding part of the construction of Via Campesina from its beginning. If we do not eradicate violence towards women within our movement, we will not advance in our struggles, and if we do not create new gender relations, we will not be able to build a new society”.
The challenge has been to move from the discursive commitment to equality in the struggle to the material reality of equality. Nevertheless, the vision of women inside LVC has significantly marked the internal debate over land titling.
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