Throughout modern history, land reform has been essential to any comprehensive social transformation of rural societies. Through the redistribution of land, more equity was attained in rural areas and social relations were altered dramatically, as the power of the feudal landlord class was broken. Besides, land reform has been a prerequisite for societies to shed their feudal characteristics and advance to a more developed mode of production.

This modern concept of land reform appeared for the first time during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. The feudal oligarchy had become a stumbling block to the development of the productive forces. Therefore, the emerging bourgeoisie resorted to redistributive land reform to enable the capitalist development of the European countryside.

In any case, wherever it has been successful, land reform implied the distribution of land from landlords to the small peasants. Obviously, a confiscatory element is essential in this process, as the landlord class is putting up fierce resistance. Hence, the crucial role of the state or another organ of political power that can wield coercive force in implementing land reform. 

Up to the 1990s, the role of the World Bank and other international organizations in promoting and supporting land reforms was rather marginal and contradictory. Although they formally endorsed land reform in conference declarations, researches and policy statements, their actual support for it was ambivalent. Moreover, agrarian reform was advocated within the constraints of the “Washington Consensus,” the straitjacket of liberalization, privatization and deregulation imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on the Third World. Actually, the World Bank actively contributed to the ebb of land reform with its structural adjustment programs that curbed public spending and its imposition of the neo-liberal paradigm that is inherently opposed to policy interventions aimed at achieving social equity. 

1 THE WORLD BANK’S OBNOXIOUS LAND REFORM IDEOLOGY

Ironically, it is the World Bank that has put agrarian reform back on the international agenda since the mid-1990s. This development warrants suspicion because it is obviously related to major changes in the global political and economic context. Now the Cold War is over and China has taken the capitalist path, the Bank thinks it can easily take advantage of the popularity of land reform among the world’s poor and launch its own land reform ideology without objections. Unsurprisingly, it has stripped the concept of land reform from any reference to actual state-led land distribution and replaced it with its own brand of “market-assisted land reform.” 

When the World Bank published its 1975 “Land Reform Policy Paper,” basically, its major recommendations wanted to do away with customary communal tenure systems that are deemed to be backward. Moreover, these common lands are traditionally used for the production of food crops and are thus incompatible with the World Bank’s model of export-oriented agriculture to service the needs of the industrialized countries. Privatization of land ownership would provide a more favorable environment for cash crop production. It likewise serves the objective of debt servicing since the proceeds of public land sales are used to generate state revenues which are channeled to the international creditors. 

Breaking up communal lands and promoting active sales markets merely benefit big landowners and create a stratum of rich entrepreneurial farmers who are able to venture into capital-intensive farming. This reflects the World Bank’s “betting on the strong” paradigm. Poor farmers, on the other hand, are being displaced, as there is no place for them in this highly competitive environment. It is clear, therefore, that these recommendations are not even hinting at land reform as a means of wiping out feudal exploitation in the countryside. 

During the 1990s, the World Bank reviewed its Land Reform Policy Paper and started pushing market-assisted land reform as a concrete alternative to redistributive land reform. The World Bank is honest enough to admit that the small farmers’ interests were not among the reasons to review its land reform policy.  Instead it justifies policy adjustments because of the advance of global neo-liberal economic policies, the end of the Cold War and the Bank’s eagerness to further undermine Third World countries.

How market-assisted land reform works in practice can be seen in Brazil, which is not only among the countries with the most unequal land distributions in the world. It is also home to one of the world's biggest and most militant peasant movements for genuine land reform: the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). According to MST, the World Bank project is undermining agrarian reform in Brazil. The net effect of the program is therefore not the distribution of land to the landless but the increasing concentration of land in the hands of the landed elite. 

2 MARKET-ASSISTED LAND REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES

After Marcos’ ouster in 1986, the Aquino government was compelled by the strength of both the armed and legal movement for genuine land reform to come up with its own agrarian reform program. Aquino’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) was never meant to distribute land to the poor and landless peasants, let alone shatter feudal rule in the countryside.

CARP clearly echoed many of the recommendations of the World Bank’s 1975 Land Reform Policy Paper. For example, it relies on sales operations to "distribute" private land to the farmers. In addition, its first priority was not parceling big private landholdings but the titling of public lands and settlements that were already tilled by farmers or the formal privatization of the commons.

When CARP was due to expire in 1998, the program hadn’t even made a start with the breakup of big landholdings or the landlords’ domination of the Philippine countryside and didn’t show any intention to do so. According to the 1998 Annual Poverty Indicator Survey, 68 percent of the households who had at least one member working in agriculture did not own land other than their residence, and only about 3 percent acquired land through CARP. At the same time, as almost all public and other less controversial lands were already covered, CARP was supposed to start tackling the more contentious estates of big landlords and corporations where the exploitation of the peasantry was much more extreme.

It is in this context the World Bank recommended to halt compulsory acquisition schemes altogether and to focus on the market-oriented provisions of CARP. This would lessen the burden the bloated CARP bureaucracy had become on the government’s budget and would be acceptable for the landed elite. Besides, CARP was already market-friendly by design and only needed some fine-tuning to align it with the World Bank model. As market-oriented land reform could be implemented within the framework of the existing government program, the World Bank didn't even have to resort to pilot programs like in Brazil and Colombia.

Apparently, Horacio Morales, who was appointed DAR Secretary in 1998, had a ready ear for the World Bank's recommendations. Although he is anxiously avoiding any reference to market-assisted land reform, his administration turned CARP into its local variety. Morales reassured the Bank of his faithfulness to its principles during the Global Development Network’s Inaugural Conference in December 1999, announcing his new framework for land reform, “based on a coherent policy framework that puts land reform in the context of well-functioning rural factor markets and emphasizes increases in productivity as the driving force underlying land reform.”

Abolishing CARP and replacing it with the World Bank model, however, would strip agrarian reform from its social justice connotation and identify it openly with the merciless neo-liberal economics the peasants are all too familiar with. Therefore, DAR has opted to make use of CARP's market-friendly provisions. Since 1998, land distribution through compulsory acquisition has become almost non-existent. Instead DAR advocates negotiated settlements in the context of a "demand-driven" approach. 

It is deplorable but not surprising that the World Bank and Morales find allies in many Philippine NGOs. Some of them are doing the legwork to gain acceptance for market-assisted land reform among their less corrupted peers and the peasantry.

The next public relations offensive is to be expected in the second half of 2000. Philippine NGOs, DAR and the World Bank will sponsor the International Conference on Agrarian Reform from December 5 to 8. In the words of Morales, the aim of this conference is “to bring together various countries to discuss the contribution of the markets in facilitating land access and poverty reduction, and the scope for involvement of local governments in implementing and financing such interventions.” The conference will also feature a summit by the agrarian reform ministers of Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mexico and the Philippines. Undoubtedly, the underlying objective is to unite governments and NGOs on the best strategy to make market-assisted land reform palatable for collaborationist NGOs so they can be used to hoodwink the farmers.

3 LAND REFORM IS THE FRUIT OF MILITANT PEASANT STRUGGLE

Analyzing the World Bank's land reform schemes from a peasant perspective, one cannot but conclude that “market-assisted land reform” is no land reform at all. It is not aiming at enhancing equitable land distribution, breaking feudal rule and advancing backward rural economies to a more developed mode of production. 

By definition, land reform implies redistributing land to the landless and near landless at the expense of large landholders and others who appropriated most of its benefits before reform. Land reform, in other words, inevitably pits the peasant class against the landlord class in the struggle for land, as their interests are irreconcilable. Preaching class collaboration with the peasants' foes is tantamount to supporting the cause of the landed elite.

The concept of market-assisted land reform also insults poor farmers as it denies the bigger dimension land has for the rural poor. For them, land is a unique social amenity as it provides them with a livelihood, food, social status, and security in times of distress like illness or old age. Degrading land to the status of just another commodity that should be subject to the whims of the free market is absurd. But it is also utterly irresponsible as it endangers the very lives of millions of poor farmers and their families.

Worst of all, however, the World Bank's land reform concept is indeed distributing land -- from the poor to the rich. Market-oriented land reform policies support the freedom of the producer and of capitalists in the accumulation of land and income, irrespective of adverse distributional consequences and effects on the wellbeing of the poor.

The World Bank, in collaboration with governments and NGOs, is openly trying to hoodwink the peasantry in order to intensify exploitation of the Third World's farmers in the context of neocolonial trade relations. Sowing confusion about the true meaning of land reform, it also hopes to undermine militant peasant organizations. Their attempts will surely turn out to be a failure as the peasant masses are well aware of their deceptive nature. 

The peasant movement should therefore also expect rising repression. In the Philippines, the government did not only declare total war against the Moro (Muslim) people, but also against any dissent in the countryside. In Brazil, militant peasants are harassed and killed mercilessly because of their determination to effect genuine land reform. In Colombia, the US is preparing its eventual military intervention as it is already arming and training the military while they are employing rightist paramilitary gangs to do the dirty work under the guise of a war against drugs. 

Land reform will only be realized through resolute and militant, armed or unarmed struggle of the organized peasantry who will exact a just distribution of land. It is therefore crucial to strengthen the peasant movement at the local and international level. The peasant movement should likewise be integrated with the overall people's movement against the reactionary forces of imperialism.

The basic alliance of workers and peasants, united with all democratic and progressive forces, will never be defeated. Militant peasant struggle will bear fruit when it is able to overthrow feudal and imperialist domination and give land to the tiller. This radical and democratic measure will put the people on the path to a world where exploitation shall be a thing of the past.