Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform

Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform PDF Author: Elias H. Tuma
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520312120
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Have land reform movements ever managed to redistribute wealth, to encourage economic development, to improve standards of living, to ensure political stability? This book answers in the negative. Drawing upon land reform movements over twenty-six centuries of history, Tuma develops a hypothesis about land tenure reform that should enable other scholars to evaluate the success of past reform movements and to see the trends of present and future ones more clearly. In the first part of the study, a general definition of land tenure reform is advanced. Starting with the ordinary meaning of reform as "a redistribution of land to benefit the small farmer or landless agricultural worker," this definition is modified so as to take into account various forms of tenure of title to land, patterns of cultivation, terms of holding, and scale of operation. The middle section of the book presents a comparative study of different types of land reform movements. Eight major "case histories" are considered--the Greek reforms of Solon and Pisistratus in the sixth century B.C.; the Roman reforms of the Gracchi in the second century B.C.; the English tenure changes covering the commutations of the Middle Ages, and the enclosures of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; the reforms accompanying the French Revolution; the three Russian reforms: the emancipation of 1861, the Stolypin reforms of 1906 - 1911, and the Soviet reform beginning in 1917; the Mexican reform after the 1910 revolution; the Japanese reform after the Second World War; and the Egyptian reform starting in 1952. In sum, the book relates the land reform movements of past centuries to those now in progress in underdeveloped countries. It argues that the land reforms of the last two decades have dealt with symptoms rather than causes, have affected only a small percentage of either the population or the cultivable area, and warns that even if high concentrations of the land-holdings are broken down, reconcentration is likely to recur unless strong preventive measures are taken. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform

Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform PDF Author: Elias H. Tuma
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520312120
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Have land reform movements ever managed to redistribute wealth, to encourage economic development, to improve standards of living, to ensure political stability? This book answers in the negative. Drawing upon land reform movements over twenty-six centuries of history, Tuma develops a hypothesis about land tenure reform that should enable other scholars to evaluate the success of past reform movements and to see the trends of present and future ones more clearly. In the first part of the study, a general definition of land tenure reform is advanced. Starting with the ordinary meaning of reform as "a redistribution of land to benefit the small farmer or landless agricultural worker," this definition is modified so as to take into account various forms of tenure of title to land, patterns of cultivation, terms of holding, and scale of operation. The middle section of the book presents a comparative study of different types of land reform movements. Eight major "case histories" are considered--the Greek reforms of Solon and Pisistratus in the sixth century B.C.; the Roman reforms of the Gracchi in the second century B.C.; the English tenure changes covering the commutations of the Middle Ages, and the enclosures of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; the reforms accompanying the French Revolution; the three Russian reforms: the emancipation of 1861, the Stolypin reforms of 1906 - 1911, and the Soviet reform beginning in 1917; the Mexican reform after the 1910 revolution; the Japanese reform after the Second World War; and the Egyptian reform starting in 1952. In sum, the book relates the land reform movements of past centuries to those now in progress in underdeveloped countries. It argues that the land reforms of the last two decades have dealt with symptoms rather than causes, have affected only a small percentage of either the population or the cultivable area, and warns that even if high concentrations of the land-holdings are broken down, reconcentration is likely to recur unless strong preventive measures are taken. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

Promised Land

Promised Land PDF Author: Peter Rosset
Publisher: Food First Books
ISBN: 9780935028287
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book represents the first harvest in the English language of the work of the Land Research Action Network (LRAN). LRAN is an international working group of researchers, analysts, nongovernment organizations, and representatives of social movements. -- pref.

Land and Development in Indonesia

Land and Development in Indonesia PDF Author: John F. McCarthy
Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
ISBN: 9814762083
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Indonesia was founded on the ideal of the “Sovereignty of the People”, which suggests the pre-eminence of people’s rights to access, use and control land to support their livelihoods. Yet, many questions remain unresolved. How can the state ensure access to land for agriculture and housing while also supporting land acquisition for investment in industry and infrastructure? What is to be done about indigenous rights? Do registration and titling provide solutions? Is the land reform agenda — legislated but never implemented — still relevant? How should the land questions affecting Indonesia’s disappearing forests be resolved? The contributors to this volume assess progress on these issues through case studies from across the archipelago: from large-scale land acquisitions in Papua, to asset ownership in the villages of Sulawesi and Java, to tenure conflicts associated with the oil palm and mining booms in Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Sumatra. What are the prospects for the “people’s sovereignty” in regard to land?

Agrarian Reform in Contemporary Developing Countries

Agrarian Reform in Contemporary Developing Countries PDF Author: Ajit Kumar Ghose
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136891773
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Initially published in 1983, in association with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), this book is about the meaning, relevance and process of agrarian reform in contemporary developing countries. It includes seven detailed case studies – one each on Ethiopia, Peru, Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, Kerala, (India) and West Bengal (India). In all the cases, serious contemporary efforts were made to implement agrarian reform programmes and the case studies focus upon selected aspects of this reform process – origins, basic characteristics, problems of implementation and immediate consequences. Each region differs considerably in terms of socio-economic and administrative conditions, but when the reform efforts are placed in their respective historical contexts, several common themes emerge which are dealt with in detail. In all cases, it is clear that agrarian reform is essentially a political process, requiring major social movements and that piecemeal reforms will not solve the grave problems of growth, distribution and poverty in the Third World.

Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform

Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform PDF Author: Elias H. Tuma
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520307348
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Have land reform movements ever managed to redistribute wealth, to encourage economic development, to improve standards of living, to ensure political stability? This book answers in the negative. Drawing upon land reform movements over twenty-six centuries of history, Tuma develops a hypothesis about land tenure reform that should enable other scholars to evaluate the success of past reform movements and to see the trends of present and future ones more clearly. In the first part of the study, a general definition of land tenure reform is advanced. Starting with the ordinary meaning of reform as "a redistribution of land to benefit the small farmer or landless agricultural worker," this definition is modified so as to take into account various forms of tenure of title to land, patterns of cultivation, terms of holding, and scale of operation. The middle section of the book presents a comparative study of different types of land reform movements. Eight major "case histories" are considered--the Greek reforms of Solon and Pisistratus in the sixth century B.C.; the Roman reforms of the Gracchi in the second century B.C.; the English tenure changes covering the commutations of the Middle Ages, and the enclosures of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; the reforms accompanying the French Revolution; the three Russian reforms: the emancipation of 1861, the Stolypin reforms of 1906 - 1911, and the Soviet reform beginning in 1917; the Mexican reform after the 1910 revolution; the Japanese reform after the Second World War; and the Egyptian reform starting in 1952. In sum, the book relates the land reform movements of past centuries to those now in progress in underdeveloped countries. It argues that the land reforms of the last two decades have dealt with symptoms rather than causes, have affected only a small percentage of either the population or the cultivable area, and warns that even if high concentrations of the land-holdings are broken down, reconcentration is likely to recur unless strong preventive measures are taken. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

Market-Led Agrarian Reform

Market-Led Agrarian Reform PDF Author: Saturnino Borras Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131799096X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Three-fourths of the world’s poor are rural poor. Most of the rural poor remain dependent on land-based livelihoods for their incomes and reproduction despite significant livelihood diversification in recent years. Land issue remains critical to any development discourse today. Market-led agrarian reform (MLAR) has gained prominence since the early 1990s as an alternative to state-led land reforms. This neoliberal policy is based on the inversion of what its proponents see as the features of earlier approaches, and calls for redistribution via privatized, decentralized transactions between ‘willing sellers’ and ‘willing buyers’. Its proponents, especially those associated with the World Bank, have claimed success where the policy has been implemented, but such claims have been contested by independent scholars as well as by peasant movements who are struggling to gain access to land. This book presents three thematic papers and six country studies. The thematic papers address issues of formalisation of property rights, gendered land rights, and neoliberal enclosure. These studies demonstrate the pervasive influence of neoliberal ideas on property rights and rural development debates, well beyond the ‘core’ question of land redistribution. The country cases bring together experiences from Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Philippines, South Africa and Egypt. Common findings include the success of landowners in minimising the impact of reform, and a lack of post-transfer support, translating into marginal impact on poverty. The limitations of the market-led approach, and the implications of the studies presented here for the future of agrarian reform, are considered in the editors’ introduction. This book was a special issue of The Third World Quarterly.

Fields of Revolution

Fields of Revolution PDF Author: Carmen Soliz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.

Agrarian Reform in Russia

Agrarian Reform in Russia PDF Author: Carol S. Leonard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139491385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Stolypin reforms, the NEP, the Collectivization, Khrushchev reforms, and finally farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises - rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and their effectiveness in transforming institutions.

Land Reform in Puerto Rico

Land Reform in Puerto Rico PDF Author: Ismael García-Colón
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813033631
Category : Land reform
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In 1941 a land redistribution plan was aimed at empowering landless workers by placing them in houses and building communities for them. Garcia-Colon assesses the technical and political aspects and the ways the Puerto Rican people resisted accomodated, and influenced the development this plan brought about.

Power over Property

Power over Property PDF Author: Matthew Noellert
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472127101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality. Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production. The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.