land reformagricultural economics
Reforms since World War II » Other recent reforms
Attempts to reform the agrarian structure have been made in most other countries, with varying degrees of seriousness. India and Pakistan have concentrated on abolishing intermediaries who prevailed as survivals of traditional and feudal tenures. In India the tenants have become hereditary holders, with the title vested in the state. India has left reform to the states and emphasized peaceful and compensatory methods; hence the results have varied from one state to another. Pakistan, following the revolution of 1958, enacted a reform that made most of the tenants owners. In both countries, however, small-scale farming has persisted, while Pakistan has continued to tolerate and protect owners of up to 500 acres (200 hectares). In neither country has fragmentation been effectively reduced or have capital formation and cultivation methods significantly advanced.
In contrast, after the Communists came to power in China, private ownership was eliminated and the peasants were organized in village communes. Extensive supplementary measures have been tried, and the role and organization of the commune have varied according to the pressures on the economy. The most recent innovation in China’s agriculture has been the “production responsibility system,” which allows the commune to contract with its members for quotas of output; the members are free to sell the surplus on the open market. The change is seen as an incentive generator, but land cannot be rented, bought, sold, or used except as authorized by the commune. The effects of China’s agrarian policy on peasant living conditions and the Chinese economy have been generally accepted as positive, genuine, and impressive.
In 1962 Iran made owners of most of the former sharecroppers, in the classic tradition of Western-type reform, mainly to create political stability. Given Iran’s revolution of 1979, however, the reform evidently was not sufficient to sustain the old social order. Reform was also introduced in Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya, and other countries of the Middle East and North Africa following independence or revolution. Most of these reforms were influenced by the Egyptian example, with the state playing a major role. In all cases emphasis has been placed on farm cooperatives, although they have been largely ineffective.
In contrast, tropical Africa has witnessed a wave of innovative reform in recent years. Reform has sometimes come in “packages,” which combine tenure reform and other measures affecting cultivation and productivity. Among the innovations is the “villagization,” or ujamaa, program of Tanzania, according to which a group of families lives, works, and makes decisions together and shares the costs and benefits of farming the land. The program began as a voluntary movement in 1967, but by 1977 it had become almost mandatory. At the same time, “block farming” and individual holdings had become acceptable forms of cooperation. The Ujamaa Villages Act of 1975 made the village the main rural administration and development unit. The most radical reforms in Africa, however, have been those of Ethiopia in 1975 and of Mozambique in 1979. Both vested the land title in the nation and abolished rent, sale, and absentee control of the land. The land was placed in the hands of the tillers, who have guaranteed right of use for themselves and for their descendants. Except in the public sector, farming is a small, family operation with a high degree of equality of landholding but of uncertain efficiency.
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a purposive change in the way in which agricultural land is held or owned, the methods of cultivation that are employed, or the relation of agriculture to the rest of the economy. Reforms such as these may be proclaimed by a government, by interested groups, or by revolution.
The concept of land reform has varied over time according to the range of functions which land itself has performed: as a factor of production, a store of value and wealth, a status symbol, or a source of social and political influence. Land value reflects its relative scarcity, which in a market economy usually depends on the ratio between the area of usable land and the size of that area’s population. As the per capita land area declines, the relative value of land rises, and land becomes increasingly a source of conflict among economic and social groups within the community.
The patterns of wealth and income distribution and of social and political influence are partly determined by the laws governing land tenure. These laws specify the acceptable forms of tenure and the privileges and responsibilities that go with them. They define the land title and the extent to which the owner can freely dispose of it and of the income accruing from its use. In this sense, the form of tenure determines the wealth and income distribution based on the land: if private ownership is permitted, class differentiation is unavoidable; in contrast, public ownership eliminates such distinctions. The forms of tenure range from temporary, conditional holding to ownership in fee simple, which confers total unencumbered rights of control and disposal over the land.
Historically, land reform meant reform of the tenure system or redistribution of the land ownership rights. In recent decades the concept has been broadened in recognition of the strategic role of...
Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
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role of Mill Mill, John Stuart
...1869 he published The Subjection of Women (written 1861), the classical theoretical statement of the case for woman suffrage. His last public activity was concerned with the starting of the Land Tenure Reform Association, for which he wrote in The Examiner and made a public speech a few months before his death; the interception by the state of the unearned increment on land and...
(1906–17), measures undertaken by the Russian government to allow peasants to own land individually. Its aim was to encourage industrious peasants to acquire their own land, and ultimately to create a class of prosperous, conservative, small farmers that would be a stabilizing influence in the countryside and would support the autocracy. After the government emancipated the serfs in 1861 it allotted land to each peasant household, but the land was collectively owned by the village communes. The communes traditionally divided the land into strips, which were distributed among the households for cultivation.
The lack of economic success in agriculture following emancipation, as well as the violent peasant uprisings that occurred during the Revolution of 1905, suggested the need to abandon communal land tenure and to replace it with individual land ownership. On Nov. 22 (Nov. 9, old style), 1906, while the Duma (the formal legislative body) was not in session, the prime minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin issued a decree that enabled each peasant household to claim individual ownership of its land allotment and to withdraw from the commune. The household could also demand that the commune provide it with a consolidated plot equivalent to the scattered strips it had been cultivating. Furthermore, the decree abolished joint household ownership and made the head of each household the sole property owner. In 1910 the decree was finally confirmed by the Duma, which passed laws expanding it in 1910 and 1911.
The reform was only a moderate success. By the end of 1916 no more than 20 percent of the peasant households had title to their land, although fewer (some 10 percent) had received consolidated plots. The reform did not transform the peasantry into the bulwark of support that the...
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land reform law land reform
...of land enserfment. When Solon was elected archon, or chief magistrate, c. 594 bc, his main objective was to free the land and destroy the horoi. His reform law, known as the seisachtheia, or “shaking-off the burdens,” cancelled all debts, freed the hektēmoroi, destroyed the horoi, and restored land to its constitutional holders. Solon...
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effect of Solon’s land reform ( in ancient Greek civilization: Solon
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Solon canceled all “debt” (as stated, this cannot yet have been debt incurred in a monetary form). He also abolished enslavement for debt, pulling up the boundary markers, or horoi, which indicated some sort of obligation. This act of pulling up the horoi was a sign that he had “freed the black earth.” The men whose land was designated by these horoi...
in land reform: Ancient reforms )...or mortgage stones, which served as symbols of land enserfment. When Solon was elected archon, or chief magistrate, c. 594 bc, his main objective was to free the land and destroy the horoi. His reform law, known as the seisachtheia, or “shaking-off the burdens,” cancelled all debts, freed the hektēmoroi, destroyed the horoi, and restored...