Get Orff my Land
And a bit more on traditional leaders. The basic problem with land reform is that you start out thinking "it's no problem, we'll just divide the number of acres by the number of people and give everyone a little plot". This is the first step on a timeline of pain. Five minutes later you are realising that not all land is of equal quality and coming up with all sorts of complicated weighting schemes to try and maintain your original egalitarian plan, ten minutes after that you are realising that plots of land have to be in specific geographical locations and are poring over maps trying to create jigsaw-puzzle allocations that will preserve existing communities, and then fifteen minutes after that your office is full of quarrelsome peasants who believe themselves to have been ripped off, and this stage lasts for two hundred years. If you are the kind of person who can only go to sleep happy if you know that you've achieved something that day, land reform is not the career for you.
And so we get into the realm of Sir Humphrey's Solution (the one which exists for every problem, which is simple, obvious and wrong). Cian rather trailed this in comments to the place below; land reform is so bloody difficult that the temptation of any passing economist is just to adopt a Gordian approach and declare the land to be the personal property of the chiefs. This is the Highland Clearances solution. Another possibility is to appropriate land which was held on a traditional-communal basis to the central state, which then comes up with a plan for distributing the property rights either by auction or by some other means. Broadly, since the state generally has strong incentives not to simply underwrite the pre-existing traditional pattern of land use, this is the Trail of Tears solution.
You can proliferate these solutions, and you don't usually have to look around too far for a manmade disaster or democide to name each one after. As I've written on the blog before, every slum clearance has a whiff of the Cultural Revolution to it, but if you don't have slum clearances you are stuck with slums. There's an interesting question in moral philosophy here - what do you do about things like slum clearances and land property rights reforms in which it might be the case that the only way to achieve a state of affairs consistent with long term development is to trample the rights and in many cases the simple humanity of millions of people for several generations?
My answer, of course, as a good business school guy, is that in general when faced with a question like this, you wait and think, potentially for a very long time indeed. People like Stalin or Mao or MacLeod of MacLeod are always much too quick to assume that their great big plan for the improvement of mankind is the only option. But of course, waiting is not a great answer either in such a case, because rural Zambia is not in a state where it's acceptable to delay development, and the population is growing while the amount of land isn't. The current Zambian strategy (which is in the process of revision) has state land with private property tenure through long leases in the copper and farming areas, and traditional land with allocation by traditional leaders in the other 90% of the country; it doesn't work particularly well from a development perspective as 75% of Zambia's population are still on less than $1/day, but at least it doesn't appear to be on the path to civil war, which probably puts it in the top quartile of African land tenure systems.
[NOTE TO SELF: insert clear and sensible proposal for land tenure reform in here when written]
Another point which makes it harder is that it's really difficult to say to small farmers that they're inefficient and that having agriculture on a really small scale isn't necessarily the best way to go about things. This is because:
ReplyDelete(a) in their terms, they're probably extremely efficient, on the principle that the smaller your operation, the less you can afford to waste ;
(b) they work bastard hard ;
(c) they know almost infinitely more about agriculture than you do ;
(d) their land is all they have.
Mind you in the contemporary world why should the situation not clarify itself over time? I think I said here in relation to sink estates that, provided opportunities for work existed in the cities, it's hard to believe that younger people won't up sticks and head for the smoke rather than try and scratch an increasingly impossible living in the middle of nowhere. They'll also find this a lot easier if they go with a cash sum in their pocket because they've sold the farm to a commercial agricultural concern. This might not happen overnight but it will, presumably, happen.
My formal academic experience of economics is confined to studying a period of UK economic history as what was probably not called a unit when I studied History at Oxford. I remember very well that the dons were entirely unable to grasp anything about a process of economic change other than the fact of improved living standards at the end of it. Really, it was all they could see: so if you had a vast process of people being forcibly uprooted, all sorts of suffering and injustice over a period of generations, but at the end of it things worked better and people had more than was the case at the start, then that was all OK.
I found this a little nauseous at the time and I still do: because yes, I could (and can) see that a process of economic development is liable to cause a certain amount of unequally distributed pain, but the people who approved that process were people who would never contemplate undergoing such a process themselves. I think this is quite important, it's not just finger-pointing, and that if you're going to have pain you need to have pain-alleviation as well. Whereas what you tend to get is "it'll all be for your own good in the end" which in the here and now means pretty much "fuck you".
They'll also find this a lot easier if they go with a cash sum in their pocket because they've sold the farm to a commercial agricultural concern.
ReplyDeletebut this is assuming away the problem of land tenure reform - they're only going to get this cash sum if they've been able to establish a valid title to the land in order to sell it up that way, which for a lot of Africa isn't the case.
Indeed. I wonder though whether disputed ownership can be settled by paying people to let somebody else have it, though that too of course opens up all sorts of possibilities for corruption...
ReplyDeleteThis is pretty much the issue over land reform in China. The government keeps edging towards full privatization, but holds back because giving the land an asset value as well as a potential use value tends to stimulate land grabs by local officials/developers. The issue is basically irresolvable without a shift in political power downwards.
ReplyDeleteOne solution mooted in China is a revival of the clan lands system of collective private property, which could then be quite effectively monetized by selling the assets and putting the proceeds into a trust, as Cowperthwaite did in Hong Kong.
jamie
The basic problem with land reform is that you start out thinking "it's no problem, we'll just divide the number of acres by the number of people and give everyone a little plot". This is the first step on a timeline of pain. Five minutes later you are realising that not all land is of equal quality ...
ReplyDeleteThis problem has already been solved. It's called "land value taxation," the program espoused by the American self-taught economist Henry George and described in his classic Progress and Poverty.
Under LVT, land would be used efficiently (i.e., won't suffer from the subdivision problem), and those who are denied access to land will be indirectly compensated by the government's collection of land rent on their behalf.
There's an interesting couple of books on the subject by Hernando de Soto about land reform in Peruvian cities.
ReplyDelete@Pete. Mike Davis seems quite hostile to de Soto in Planet of Slums. Something about making out that slums are really creative places to be in rather than completely exploitative.
ReplyDeleteBut anyway, the few conversations I had in the Tibetan plateau seems to suggest there's resentment in the current arrangements towards greater morcellisation of lands for the Tibetan peasants, and the inability of local government to provide basic public goods so that they can have access to urban jobs (cos they're the wrong ethnicity).
but at least it doesn't appear to be on the path to civil war, which probably puts it in the top quartile of African land tenure systems
ReplyDeleteExcept that the current Zambian arrangement is basically the typical African arrangement.
The peacefullness may be explained by the low density.