Pro-Poor Land Reform: A Critique

pro-poor

land reform

pro-poor

land reform

a critique

SATURNINO M. BORRAS JR.

© University of Ottawa Press 2007

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Borras, Saturnino M

Pro-poor land reform : a critique / Saturnino M. Borras Jr.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7766-0650-7

1. Land reform--Philippines. 2. Land reform. 3. Rural poor--Philippines.

4. Rural poor. 5. Land reform--Government policy--Philippines.

6. Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (Philippines). I. Title.

HD1333.P6B673 2007        333.3’1599         C2007-903932-4

Published by the University of Ottawa Press, 2007

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The University of Ottawa Press acknowledges with gratitude the support extended to its publishing list by Heritage Canada through its Book Publishing Industry Development Program, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through its Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and by the University of Ottawa. We also gratefully acknowledge the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague whose financial support has contributed to the publication of this book.

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Eric Cabanit, secretary general of UNORKA,

assassinated in Davao in April 2006;

my dear friend and comrade Max Frivaldo,

assassinated in Irosin, Sorsogon, in January 2006; and

countless unknown land reform activists

who were killed in the course of their struggles

for land, food, freedom, and dignity

— in the Philippines and in many parts of the world.

I also dedicate this book to the memory of

some of the best leaders of agrarian reform movements

in the Philippines who passed away without seeing

the full realization of their dream of a just Philippine society:

Felicisimo "Ka Memong" Patayan, Ka Simon Sagnip,

and Ka Nilo Oracion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

       Some Gaps in Land Reform Studies

Chapter 1

       The Politics of Redistributive Land Reform:

       Conceptual Reconsideration

Chapter 2

       Land and Tenancy Reforms in the Philippines:

       A National-Level View of Structures and Institutions,

       Processes and Outcomes

Chapter 3

       CARP’s Non-redistributive Policies and Outcomes

Chapter 4

       CARP’s Redistributive Policies and Outcomes

Chapter 5

       State–Society Interactions for Redistributive Land Reform

Conclusion

       The Challenge of Redistributive Land Reform:

       Conclusions and Implications

Notes

List of Abbreviations

References

Index

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1: Possible Outcomes of Land (Reform) Policies in Public Lands

Table 1.2: Economic and Socio-political Bases of Land Reforms

Table 1.3: Key Features of State- and Market-Led Approaches to Land Reform in Private Lands

Table 2.1: Population of the Philippines, 1961–1999

Table 2.2: Size Distribution of Farms, 1980

Table 2.3: Concentration of Agricultural Land Ownership, 1988

Table 2.4: Value of Total Agricultural Exports-Imports, 1971–2002

Table 2.5: Value of Exports of Non-traditional Crops, 1971–2002

Table 2.6: Comparative Yield per Hectare in Rice and Corn, Selected Countries

Table 2.7: Trends in Revealed Comparative Advantage, Agriculture and Selected Major Agricultural Exports, 1960–1998

Table 2.8: DAR’s Land Redistribution Scope, Deductions, and Accomplishment, 1972–2005

Table 2.9: Total Land Redistribution under the DAR, 1972–2005

Table 2.10: Total Land Redistribution under the DENR, 1987–2004

Table 2.11: Number of Beneficiaries of Land Reform Programs, 1972–2000

Table 2.12: Yearly Summary of Leasehold Accomplishment, 1986–2003

Table 3.1: Land Deducted from the DAR Scope, as of 31 March 2005

Table 3.2: DAR’s Land Distribution Accomplishment, by Land Acquisition Modality, 1972–2005

Table 3.3: Deductions from the CARP Scope, by Region, as of 2005

Table 3.4.a: National Summary of Deductions Based on Legal Grounds, as of 1998

Table 3.4.b: Geographic (Regional) Distribution of Deductions Based on Legal Grounds, as of 1998

Table 3.5: Pangasinan’s Land Reform Accomplishment, DAR Jurisdiction, as of 2001

Table 4.1: DAR Land Redistribution Output in Private Lands, 1972–2005

Table 4.2: DENR’s Accomplishment in A&D Lands and CBFM, 1987–2001

Table 5.1: The KMP-Visayas Number of Participants in Mass Mobilizations, 1985–1991

Table 5.2: State–Society Interactions and Spatial Variations in Policy Outcomes

FOREWORD

Revolutions and peasant insurgencies during the 20th century often led to major land reforms, as occurred in Mexico and China. In the post-1945 Cold War climate many governments introduced land reform legislation to preempt more radical change. Some governments also viewed land reform as a precondition for industrialization and economic development. Undoubtedly land reform played a key role in the economic success of South Korea and Taiwan, a fact that is often overlooked. Overall, the record of land reforms is more mixed, as most governments failed to deliver. Far less land was redistributed than promised and those who did benefit often had to compete on disadvantageous terms in the market without any economic support from the state.

During the 1980s land reforms were no longer on the policy agenda. On the contrary, with the neoliberal agenda ushered in by the debt crisis and the World Bank–driven structural adjustment program, many governments put an end to land reform and facilitated the development of land markets. Furthermore, many developing countries liberalized and opened their economies, a process that resulted in the bankruptcy of many peasant farmers who were unable to compete with the cheap and subsidized imports from North America and the European Union. Such liberalizing measures can be described as a counter-reform by stealth, as peasants were forced to sell their land to pay off their debts and join the army of cheap labour. A few countries even implemented counter-reform measures in which many former land reform beneficiaries were driven from the land.

The exclusionary and concentrating consequences of neoliberal policies provoked a resurgence of peasant and indigenous movements claiming their rights to a dignified livelihood as exemplified by the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia. Land reform continues to be a major demand of these movements as well as of others throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Borras’s book thus appears at an opportune moment. It is the most comprehensive and up-to-date study ever published on the agrarian reform in the Philippines. The Philippine case is of particular interest given the long history of land reform, which began in 1963 and is still ongoing, as the current struggles of rural workers in the countryside testify. To this day many peasant leaders are assassinated in the Philippines for daring to defend the interests of the rural poor.

This book should be read by all those interested in land reform. Borras’s novel theoretical perspective and methodology extend their relevance well beyond the Philippines. His state–civil society interaction theory and conceptualization of land reform provide a completely new interpretation of the Philippines’ land reform. Those who read this book will have to look at other land reform experiences with fresh eyes. Hopefully it will bolster the fulfilment of the lost promise of land reform. The struggles of millions of landless and poor peasants throughout the world demand no less.

Cristóbal Kay

Professor of Rural Development and Development Studies

Institute of Social Studies

The Hague, The Netherlands

18 October 2006

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Philippine government has claimed great success in its land redistribution program. This claim is rejected and dismissed by critics who argue that nothing significant has been achieved by the state land reform. Meanwhile, various international development institutions have moved on to launch large-scale market-oriented land policies including the formalization of private property rights over land resources, alongside the so-called market-led agrarian reform model. These initiatives have been questioned widely by critics. Indeed in recent years there has been a worldwide revival of interest in the issue of land — land reform, land policies, property rights — but in significantly different ways than the previous initiatives around land reform. It is within this general global and national political context that I embarked on the research that has led to the publication of this book. The principal motivation for me was political: to get a good sense of the debates on land reform and peasant movements in the Philippines and act accordingly in order to contribute to peasant struggles for land and democracy. The subsequent research undertaking has necessarily brought me deeper into the peasant communities across the country, while at the same time it has pushed me to take a broader perspective worldwide. The same political challenge has required a rigorous academic research discipline; and fortunately the latter was provided by my doctoral studies at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague.

The fieldwork for this study is comprised of both formal/structured and informal/unstructured elements. The former pertains to my official affiliation with the ISS as a doctoral student, with scholarship support from the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP). Under this program I conducted an intensive year of field research in the Philippines during the period 2001–2002. The latter spans a much longer period of time, stretching far back into the early 1980s (when I was just starting my activist involvement with the peasant movement in the Philippines) and extending up to the present (during my regular field research trips to the Philippines involving a variety of other intellectual and political undertakings). It is important to note that while in the process of constructing a coherent dissertation, I started to develop the component parts of the thesis, and several of these parts have been published in academic journals. Throughout all these processes and during this entire period, as can well be imagined, I became indebted to so many institutions and individuals who, in a variety of ways, have assisted and inspired me to persist in this study. I wish to thank all of them here — but of course it is not possible to name them all. I trust that they all know how grateful I am to them. I will simply mention a few individuals and institutions:

I would like to thank the NFP for the generous support extended to me to carry out my doctoral studies and research. I also thank the Rural Development, Environment and Population Studies Group (RDEPS) at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) for providing me with a job, an office space, and logistical support that enabled me to carry out a number of research initiatives and at the same time revise my dissertation, prepare the manuscript for this book, and go through the process of publishing this book. More particularly, I thank the land research group at RDEPS for its financial support to the later phase of this book project — and by implication, the land research group’s funders: the Inter-Church Organization for Development and Cooperation (ICCO), Cordaid, Oxfam Novib, and the Belgian 11.11.11.

I would like to thank several academic journals and publishers for allowing me to publish my articles, or parts of them, in this book: Development and Change, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of International Development, Review of International Political Economy, European Journal for Development Research, Critical Asian Studies, and Progress in Development Studies; the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD), the Transnational Institute (TNI), and FoodFirst Books. And I would also like to thank the Ateneo de Manila University Press, which is publishing my two volume book on agrarian reform, rural development, and social movements: There are several overlapping chapters between this current book and those two volumes, although they are significantly different.

There are several key intellectual influences on this book that I would like to acknowledge and thank, without of course attributing to them my final analysis or the errors that may remain in this work.

I am extremely grateful to Ben White and Cris Kay — my dissertation supervisors, who provided me with intellectual guidance and inspiration, allowing me space for my own exploration and innovation while providing constant reminders of the requisites of proper research. Their critical comments and helpful suggestions saved this study from embarrassing mistakes and greatly improved the quality of its arguments.

I am deeply indebted as well to Danilo Carranza, Jonathan Fox, Jennifer Franco, Ron Herring, James Putzel, and Manuel Steve Quiambao for their varying intellectual inputs to this study. James and Ron made their contribution by reading and commenting on several other related papers, in addition to their official task as members of the examination committee of my dissertation. I am also grateful to Rosanne Rutten, Bridget O’Laughlin, Otto van den Muijzenberg, and Erhard Berner — all of whom were involved in the process of my thesis writing and defence, providing much needed intellectual assistance and raising critical and challenging questions.

I am also grateful to my other teachers and colleagues at ISS, some of whom I have already mentioned above: Haroon Akram Lodhi, David Dunham, Cris Kay, Wicky Meynen, Eric Ross, Ashwani Saith, Antonella Sorrentino, Max Spoor, Ben White, and Marc Wuyts. They have provided me with an inspiring and stimulating intellectual community and have been extremely supportive to my research projects during my stay at ISS. I also thank many former fellow doctoral students as well as the Filipino community at the ISS with whom I shared great intellectual and personal experiences.

As mentioned earlier, several parts of this book have been published in a number of journals and as chapters in books. In the process of these publications, I became indebted to several people for giving their comments and suggestions on how to improve my draft papers. Of course many of these people were anonymous, especially the reviewers; I thank them anyway. But several people were known to me — and I thank them here: Walden Bello, Henry Bernstein, Paula Bownas, Terry Byres, Dominique Caouette, the late Ranjit Dwivedi, Tom Fenton, Tim Forsyth, John Gershman, Krishna Ghimire, Paolo Groppo, John Harriss, Frank Hirtz, Peter Houtzager, Ben Kerkvliet, Hans Meliczek, Sarah O’Byrne, Joel Rocamora, Sergio Sauer, and David Wurfel.

Three parallel intellectual initiatives were going on at the time when I was revising the manuscript for this book. The first one was the Land Reform, Poverty Reduction and Public Action joint research by the ISS and UNDP. It brought together more than a dozen scholars to study and compare lessons from ten developing and transition countries. The debates, discussions, and exchanges of information and ideas were so rich and insightful and have benefited this book in so many ways. I am grateful to all my fellow workshop participants in this project, especially Terry McKinley. The other initiative was the Citizen Engagement in National Policy Change. Sponsored by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Sussex, the project brought together eight scholars to study different experiences of state–civil society interactions in eight countries. Many of the ideas from the series of brainstorming sessions in this research were very useful in sharpening the arguments of this book. I would like to thank my fellow workshop participants in this project, especially John Gaventa, Gary Hawes, and Mark Robinson. Finally, this book benefited so much from my deep involvement in the preparation for and in the actual conduct of the International Conference on Land, Poverty, Social Justice and Development at the ISS in The Hague in January 2006, which brought together more than three hundred scholars, peasant leaders, civil society activists, and development policy experts from all over the world. The exchanges of information and heated debates in this conference have enhanced my knowledge about other experiences outside the Philippines as well as new theoretical thinking related to land policies.

Moreover, I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the University of Ottawa Press (UOP) for their critical but very useful comments and suggestions to the final draft of the book manuscript. I also thank Eric Nelson and Marie Clausén at UOP for their support and assistance with this project, as well as Trish O’Reilly for her excellent copy-editing work.

Political discussions with activists and development practitioners in the Philippines and internationally have equally been helpful in this study. It might require several pages to list all the organizations and people who have, one way or another, helped in this process, so I will list here just a few special ones: Armin Paasch and Sofia Monsalve at the FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN); Evert de Boer at the Filipijnen Groep Nederland (FGN), and Malu Padilla of Bayanihan in Utrecht; fellow development practitioners at ICCO; friends and comrades at the Transnational Institute (TNI) and XminY both in Amsterdam and at 11.11.11 in Brussels.

To friends and comrades at the PEACE Foundation, UNORKA, PARRDS, Padayon, MFDC, and AFRIM — it is too risky to name names, because I’m sure I will miss several: I am deeply indebted to all of them for their friendship and solidarity, patience and support all these years. In countless ways they have helped facilitate my fieldwork and my access to key social movement information and have provided constant inspiration.

I also thank all those who agreed to be interviewed for this study — and as can be seen from the list of interviewees in the references, there are many of them. I was tempted many times to name a few of them here, but I could not decide whom to select: the top officials who gave me rare insiders’ views or the rank and file DAR officials who provided me critical front-line information; a famous peasant leader or an ordinary land claim–maker? It is not easy to choose. In the end, I decided not to name names.

Finally, I thank my long-time intellectual collaborator, critic, fellow activist and best friend Jennifer Franco for all her great input to this research and for her patience, understanding, and self-sacrifice during the long years of my doctoral studies.

Salamatunon tabi sa iyo intero!

INTRODUCTION

SOME GAPS

IN LAND REFORM STUDIES

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The resurgence of land-based peasant and indigenous peoples’ movements in many parts of the world since the 1990s on the one hand and the aggressive neoliberal push for land market reforms on the other have put the issue of redistributive land reform back onto the official agendas of international development institutions, national governments, and academics. However the key themes being discussed are significantly different from the conventional land reform scholarship: willing buyer –willing seller transactions instead of expropriation, private and decentralized land sales and land rental transactions instead of public policies on land redistribution and restitution by central governments, cutting back on public spending instead of more budget allocation for agrarian reform, among others. The current debate has put land reform theory and practice in the critical spotlight.¹

Written within this global context, this book offers a critique and contribution from the Philippine experience, where a significant land redistribution outcome has recently been officially reported and claimed by government but has been questioned by critics. Between the optimistic official claims and the pessimistic critiques, we attempt to determine what has actually happened in the Philippine land reform process and what insights can be drawn from this national experience that are relevant to the current global land reform studies and debates.

1.2 THE PROBLEM

Five types of agrarian cases from the Philippines are presented below. The cases were lumped together with thousands of others in the nationally aggregated reports of the Philippine Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). Alongside hundreds of thousands of specific cases reported nationwide as land redistribution accomplishments, the cases cited below were lost as individual stories, as they became depersonalized quantitative data — the type of data used by scholars, policymakers, and political activists to analyze land reform programs. The analytic lens of conventional land reform literature has difficulty fully accounting for and explaining the nature and implications of these cases. This largely sets the stage for the problematic addressed in this study.

Case One: A piece of public land has long been under the effective control of a landlord despite the absence of a formal land title. According to government documents, the land is public forest, and so without agricultural tenants. In reality, it is productive farmland planted to coconut and worked by peasants under a share tenancy arrangement. Learning about the state land reform program, the peasants petitioned the government for the redistribution of the landholding despite harassment from the landlord. Largely due to sustained peasant mobilization, the government acted on the petition and redistributed the land to the peasants. Subsequently, the transaction was reported as land redistribution accomplishment under the public forest land component of the land reform program.

Case Two: A parcel of private land is owned by a landlord. It has been planted with mangoes and worked by several farmworkers. This landholding is under the scope of the land reform law. The landlord complied with the law by redistributing the farm via the voluntary land transfer scheme. In fact the landlord redistributed the land to his family members and to paper beneficiaries through this voluntary scheme. On paper, the beneficiaries paid the landlord for the land, but in reality no payment was made. There is no need for it because the landlord remains the land’s real owner, the estate remains a single operational farm unit, and farm surplus extraction and disposition remain under the landlord’s absolute control. In fact, nothing has changed, except the formal documents claiming that the farm has been subjected to redistributive land reform and is now owned by worker beneficiaries. This case has been reported as an accomplishment of the land reform program under its private land category.

Based on the conventional wisdom in the land reform literature, Case One, having been reported as accomplishment in public lands, is not considered a redistributive land reform, and its significance is dismissed. Case Two, having been reported as accomplishment in private lands, is considered a redistributive land reform, and its importance is underscored. These readings are obviously wrong. In fact, the first case is a real redistributive case, while the second is an apparent-but-not-real redistributive land reform. Case One has real impact on the actually existing agrarian structure, while Case Two has none.

Case Three: This case involves dozens of tenants tilling the rice farm of a politically powerful landlord. One day, the landlord asked them to sign a paper claiming that the land had been sold to the tenants at a specified price and on cash basis in compliance with the land reform program (that allows for direct payment as a legal land redistribution mechanism). The so-called sale is fake, and the landlord made this clear to the tenants. The landlord also warned that all those who refused to sign the document would have to leave the home lots allotted to tenants within the hacienda and would no longer be taken on as tenants or as hired farm labourers. All of the tenants signed the documents. Thus, on paper they are the owners of the land, but in reality they are not; they are coerced on-paper beneficiaries of the land reform program. This case has been reported as land redistribution accomplishment in the private land category of the land reform program.

Case Four: Two years after receiving a parcel of land under the land reform program, a beneficiary was forced to sell her land after her child fell ill in order to raise money for the medical expenses. The buyer was the son of the former landlord who suffered expropriation under the land reform program. However, the land reform law prohibits the sale of awarded lands within ten years of the award. Thus, in all legal documents, the owner of the land is still the peasant beneficiary, but in reality she has nothing to do with the land in any way. The sale was not coerced; it was mutually agreed between her and the buyer.

Case Five: A landlord donated his orchard to his workers. There was no payment required, but there was a condition: the worker beneficiaries had to put the land into a joint venture agreement with the (former) landlord for sixty years, wherein the land reform beneficiaries/new owners could continue to be farmworkers and were promised dividends if and when the joint corporation made a profit. An almost absolute right was given to the joint corporation whose majority stocks were controlled by the landlord due to what was claimed to be capital intensive investments made by the latter compared to the (deliberately depressed) assessed value of the land, which was provided as equity by the land reform beneficiaries. Thus, on paper the worker-beneficiaries own the land, but in reality the landlord maintains effective control. The change occurred only on paper. The case was reported as land redistribution accomplishment of the land reform program under its private land category.

Cases Three to Five demonstrate varying forms of the phenomenon of apparent-but-not-real ownership of land. As these cases show, such a condition can either be forcibly imposed upon peasants by a powerful landlord, it can be mutually agreed between a landlord and poor peasants through the (illegal) sale of land, or it can be a result of some trick through promises of better economic arrangements around a particular land use.

These five cases are both real and familiar in the contemporary Philippine land reform process. In addition to the cases presented, there are many more situations in the actually existing agrarian structure in the Philippines — and very likely elsewhere — that, like the five cases, are not fully captured or explained by the dominant land reform theoretical perspectives. When such phenomena are detected, scholars and policymakers tend to dismiss them as policy implementation anomalies or as administrative problems and operational aberrations.

This study is undertaken on the assumption that such cases are actually quite commonplace and that therefore the causes and consequences of these phenomena should be investigated; in the end, this may require a reexamination of the theory and practice of land reform. This study aims to provide better understanding of the anomalies that surfaced in the cases cited above. It also aims to examine the implications of such cases for the broader theory and practice of redistributive land reform. For these purposes, the study investigates land reform in the Philippines.

Historically, most land reform scholars have believed that only through state-led public policies can significant movement be achieved toward resolution of the problem of skewed land-ownership distribution in agrarian societies in favour of poor peasants (in this study, the term peasants is taken in a loose definition to mean landless and near-landless tenants and farmers, farmworkers, and other rural wage labourers and rural semi-proletariat).² Considering land as having a multidimensional character, that is, it interlinks political, economic, social, and cultural functions,³ this approach relies on the interventionist central state to exercise its redistributive and regulatory powers, as well as on strong, independent peasant movements to mount political pressure to implement the reform.⁴ This approach is expropriationary to varying degrees. Its revolutionary variant is confiscatory — not compensating landlords and redistributing lands to beneficiaries for free. The less revolutionary expropriationary type of land reform compensates landlords at below the market price and redistributes land either for free or under subsidized repayment schemes.⁵ Likewise, within this tradition post–land transfer development is state-led, via agricultural extension services, production and trade subsidies, and infrastructure provision, while beneficiaries are organized either into collectives or associations of individual farmers. In this approach, the role of the market is not altogether dismissed, but it is highly regulated, ostensibly to protect the emerging small family farms and farm collectives from the perceived harshness of unregulated market forces.

To varying extents and in different versions, state-led agrarian reforms have been widely enacted and somewhat less widely implemented in many countries for the greater part of the past century until the late 1970s. Past initiatives have shown that achieving a substantial degree of success in redistributive land reform is possible but not automatic, difficult but not altogether impossible. In any case, the outcomes have almost always been partial (Borras, 2006a).⁶ For various reasons, including the debt crises of the 1980s, land reform was dropped from many policy agendas from the late 1970s onward.⁷

Despite the series of land reforms carried out in earlier decades, lack of effective control over and ownership of land by the rural poor remains a major problem today.⁸ Sporadic but dramatic land-based political conflicts since the 1990s are among the more obvious symptoms of the persistence of the land problem. But while militant political actions by some peasant movements, such as those in Brazil, Chiapas (in Mexico), and Zimbabwe, have helped put land reform back onto the theoretical and policy agendas,⁹ it is, arguably, the push from the pro-market academic and policy circles¹⁰ that has provided the crucial impetus for the resurrection of the issue. It is not surprising therefore that current scholarship as well as policy and political debates on land reform revolve largely around the terms and issues set by the pro-market literature.

The dominance of neoliberal ideas in mainstream development policy thinking has put the issue of land into a new perspective. The limitations of the earlier neoliberal policies, especially the income-centred and growth-oriented views on poverty and development, became more apparent in the late 1980s. The persistence of poverty and growing inequality have in fact brought this mainstream development framework into question. Revisions of the dominant paradigm were then introduced. In this context, the issue of rural poor people’s access to productive assets, especially land, was brought (back) in. The notion of insecurity in rural livelihoods as well as that of investments in the countryside have become an important foundation of the revised framework, anchored on the assumption that it is the insecure access to productive resources that has led to unstable livelihoods and lack of investments.¹¹ The task for the mainstream development framework has become quite clear: to develop formal private (and usually individualized) landed property rights. For public lands, this entails the development of more efficient cadastral records and surveying programs, with the end view of establishing clearer property rights, either through individualized titles or via community land rights with individualized land use rights within them.¹² These policies concern most of the remaining lands that are not fully privatized or whose registration and titles are not formalized (yet), including state-owned and collectively organized landholdings that were the outcomes of previous land reform programs, such as the many cases in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the transition countries.¹³ For private lands, the principal bias is to take away all legal prohibitions on freer land sales and rental transactions in the market, with emphasis on developing land rentals. Under certain conditions, lands sales will be encouraged but strictly on a voluntary basis, which has become widely known as market-led agrarian reform (World Bank, 2003; Deininger, 1999; Deininger and Binswanger, 1999). Hence, land policies have become quite important in the current mainstream international development institutions, and in turn, among national government agencies and civil society organizations. Specifically, in Latin America, but with global implications, Carter and Salgado (2001; see also World Bank, 2003) sum it up:

Despite the renewed prominence of [issues related to access to land], the traditional policy instrument of state-mandated redistributive land reform is decidedly off the agenda in most Latin American countries. Contemporary land policy is primarily comprised of two instruments: (1) land titling, including the assignment of individual, marketable land titles to the beneficiaries of earlier redistributive reforms; and (2) negotiated or market-assisted land reform. (246–247)

The emergence of the pro-market approach as a proposition challenging the state-led approach has provoked debate in academic, policy, and political circles. The contemporary debate has shaped, and been reshaped by, two dominant currents in land reform scholarship. The first is the limits-centred approach. Today, many scholars of state-led agrarian reform believe that the recent socioeconomic and political changes at the international, national, and local levels have called into question the feasibility of carrying out an ideal type state-led agrarian reform. This thinking rests on two assumptions: (i) that there is a weakening of the regulatory and redistributive powers of the central state and (ii) that market reforms impose greater constraints on peasant movements. Others emphasize the political near-impossibility of redistributive land reform today, arguing that some segments of the landowning class have been provided with even more incentives to resist reform amidst the new possibilities for agricultural exports that have been opened up by neoliberal reforms. Policymakers’ renewed interest in economic efficiency partly via the reduction of transaction costs through cutbacks in public spending has also imposed limits on redistributive land reforms, which have tended to be financially expensive.¹⁴ Finally, the waning of peasant-based communist insurgencies in most developing countries and the end of the Cold War have taken away two crucial factors that motivated many governments to implement land reform in the past.¹⁵

The second current is the opportunities-centred approach. The same recent political and economic changes considered by many scholars as obstacles to land reform are, interestingly, viewed by others as opportunities for land reform. Some academics blame past failures to solve the problem of lack of access to land and underdevelopment in agriculture to what they label as the coercive statist, highly centralized, and supply-driven approaches in classic agrarian reform. Pro-market scholars and policymakers celebrate recent initiatives worldwide toward a less interventionary role for the central state in the economy and public administration. The marginalization of inward-oriented development policy and its substitution by an outward, export-oriented paradigm constitutes a key opportunity for land reform, according to these scholars.¹⁶ The World Bank (n.d.) celebrates these changes:

As structural adjustment programs in many parts of the world have reduced subsidies to large farms, privatized government collective farms, and created better financial instruments for the wealthy than land, a potentially transferable supply of land has come onto the market. The latent demand for that land by the poor often cannot be realized because they lack the capital. Market assisted land reform helps activate the market and create the environment in which land can be transferred from large to small farms. (1)

The persistence of these dichotomous views in the land reform literature poses an analytic challenge. Arguably, a fundamental misconception underlying the contemporary views of the prospects of land reform is the confusion about, and conflation of, what is redistributive reform and what is not. An incomplete, and at times muddled, understanding about the meaning of redistributive reform has permitted the entry of non-redistributive types of land reform into the land reform literature. The inclusion of some concepts and exclusion of others in the literature has blurred, not clarified, important ideas crucial to understanding redistributive land reform. But even if the concepts used are clarified, confusion can still persist if scholars are vague about the nature of the empirical data they are working on. Here an insight from Herring (1983) is relevant:

Much of the literature on land reform in [South Asia] dismisses the reforms as mere charades manipulated by ruling elites to pacify the peasantry, coopt leftist critics, and satisfy modernist elite sectors while effecting little structural change in rural areas. Such a view, while certainly accurate in part … requires considerable modification. The case studies [in this book] clearly indicate change induced by land reforms, though not always in directions indicated by reform rhetoric. This structural change is of two kinds — apparent and real. Though it seems contradictory to write of apparent structural change, the usage is meaningful. Land reforms produce important alterations in the observable structure of agrarian systems — land records are altered, census data collected, reports are made — all presenting a picture of the rural world that is more congruent with the needs of landed elites, administrators, and ruling politicians than with reality on the ground. Landowners have strong incentives to show that they own very little land and that there are no tenants on it; reform administrators are pressured to show progress in implementation. … The apparent change is important because it is this data-built facade which goes into planning documents, policy debates, reports of international agencies, and all too many scholarly treatments. The distortions become social facts, the primary sources for understanding the rural world for nonrural groups who are, after all, the primary movers of rural policy. (269, italics original)

In putting forward the issue of discrepancies between what is officially recorded and claimed on the one side, and what actually exists, on the other, Herring raises a crucial issue with implications for the current debate on redistributive land reform. A deeper examination reveals that there are numerous types of real and apparent redistributive land reforms, far more even than the types shown by Herring in the case of South Asia. This is partly shown in the five cases presented in this chapter’s introduction.

The theoretical problem facing contemporary land reform scholarship therefore is fundamental in nature. It is impossible for scholars and policymakers to resolve among themselves the critical issue of redistributive land reform if there is no clarity and unity among them about its basic concepts. While historically there seems to be an understanding about the core land reform concept, closer inspection reveals that this unity is more assumed than demonstrated. Rather than reproduce uncritically the conventional assumption, this research opts to problematize — in a manner explained in the first section of this introduction — the concept of redistributive land reform before examining the current questions with regard to opportunities for and limits to redistributive land reform.

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND ARGUMENTS

The study poses three central research questions: (i) When do land policies and policy outcomes constitute redistributive land reform? (ii) How and to what extent do pre-existing structural and institutional settings shape and condition the nature of land reform policies and the types of land reform policy outcomes? (iii) How and to what extent do political actions and strategies of pro-reform state and societal actors influence the nature, pace, extent, and direction of land reform policy implementation processes and outcomes?

By answering the first question, this book aims to contribute toward a clearer understanding of the basic building block of land reform studies today, that is, the notion of redistributive reform. This critical reflection is not simply a question of semantics; it is a fundamental issue that must be clarified theoretically, empirically, and methodologically. Consequently, a clearer view about this basic point aims to facilitate a more systematic discussion about the limits to, opportunities for, and state–society interactions around redistributive land reform. It aims to better frame the discussion on the importance of political actions and the strategies of state and societal actors with regard to redistributive reform.

The main arguments are as follows: First, redistributive land reform policies and their outcomes are, in reality, of two types: real and apparent-but-not-real. Most land reform studies fail to distinguish these two types systematically, leading to, at best, partial, or, worse, flawed understanding of redistributive land reforms. The lack of clarity as to what is and what is not a redistributive land reform is rooted mainly in the use of frameworks fixated on the official and static private-public land property rights dichotomy. This has led to the problematic dominant views in land reform theory and practice because it: (i) excluded actually existing land-based production and distribution relationships that occur in lands that are officially classified as public; (ii) inconsistently included — or excluded — real redistributive reform achieved via share tenancy or leasehold reform; and (iii) inadvertently included land transfers involving private lands that do not actually constitute real redistributive reform.

To better understand what is redistributive land reform and what is not, the definition of redistributive reform is problematized, emphasizing two key issues: (i) the actual and effective control over the land resource — meaning, the power to control the nature, pace, extent, and direction of surplus production and extraction from the land and the disposition of such surplus and (ii) the transfer of power to control land resources, which has to occur, but such transfer must flow from landed elite to the landless and land-poor peasants — meaning, the direction of change must categorically traverse social classes but favour the landless and near-landless poor and not remain within a social class, or within elite classes, or, worse, be from the landless and land-poor to the landowning classes. Thus, redistributive reform is achieved only when there is actual net transfer of (power for) effective control over the land resource. This can happen when peasants are able to secure, exercise, and maintain effective control over the nature, pace, extent, and direction of surplus production and extraction from the land and disposition of such surplus, regardless of whether it is in private or public lands, or whether it involves a formal change in the right to alienate (full ownership) or not (e.g., leasehold or stewardship).

Second, the current global agrarian restructuring and changes in international political economy have transformed the structure of, limits to, and opportunities for redistributive reforms like land reform. This has, in turn, inspired the emergence of studies that emphasize either the limits or the opportunities. While the limits-centred and opportunities-centred approaches both have explanatory power, both have weaknesses also. The problem with the limits-centred approach is its over-emphasis on the obstacles to redistributive land reform; this overlooks actual and potential opportunities. In fact, there is a tendency among some scholars to over-emphasize the limits to redistributive land reform in the neoliberal era. They generally give so much attention to pre-existing structural and institutional constraints and obstacles that they overlook latent, and even actual, opportunities. Most critical land reform scholars tend to focus their analyses on only those social and political institutions and relationships that reinforce anti-reform power. They tend to take structural and institutional limits as something fixed and static and, so, insurmountable. Therefore, they have difficulty explaining redistributive land reforms when they do occur in unexpected circumstances. Such structural and institutional factors favouring anti-reform forces are certainly operative in the real world. But there are also institutions and relationships that, while they do not automatically undermine anti-reform power, can be mobilized to counteract manoeuvres by anti-reform forces. Meanwhile, the problem with the opportunities-centred perspective is its over-emphasis on the favourable factors for land reform today; this approach fails to understand and acknowledge the actual and potential limits to reforms. The tendency among other scholars to highlight individual human agency and policy and institutional reforms assumes that, given proper institutional incentives and disincentives, individuals will behave in a rational manner (i.e., to maximize their individual, usually assumed to be economic, interests). Founded on the premise that recent pro-market policy and institutional reforms encourage and promote the maximization of individual interests in a rational way, these scholars highlight the opportunities recently opened up for land reform. This approach tends to overlook the crucial role of pre-existing macro-socioeconomic structures and socio-political institutions that either hinder rational behaviour or promote irrational actions from a range of actors.

More fundamentally, the two camps’ partial understanding of redistributive land reforms has resulted in the conflation of and confusion over several concepts in land reform. This has resulted in even more confusion in the discussion about limits to and possibilities for redistributive land reform. One camp may be discussing limits to land reform, the other camp may be discussing opportunities for a non-redistributive land reform, and so on. Therefore, problematizing the fundamental concept of redistributive land reform and placing the discussion about the limits to and possibilities for land reform within this core concept can contribute toward a better understanding of land reform in theory and practice. Building on the strength of both approaches, but addressing their weaknesses, this study argues that pre-existing structural and institutional settings are important determinants of the nature of limits to and opportunities for land reform, and therefore, of its outcomes, but they are never the sole determinants. The nature and extent of influence that pre-existing structures and institutions bear upon land reform processes and outcomes are, in turn, largely determined by the extent to which the structures and institutions shape and condition the pre-existing distribution of power of the various actors that ally or compete with each other to control land resources. Such structures and institutions provide the context within which actors amass, maintain, or lose some degree of power in the recursive, dynamic multi-actor contestations over control of land. But this is not a one-way relationship, because the same structures and institutions are, at the same time, the objects of these contestations.

Finally, the political actions and strategies of state and societal actors do matter. The alliance between state reformists and autonomous reformist societal groups can, under certain conditions, surmount obstacles, overcome limits, and harness opportunities to allow a redistributive land reform to occur. This alliance is achieved at various levels of the polity, but in a highly varied and uneven manner, geographically, across crops and farm types, across land reform policy components, and over time. The character and extent of this coalition, in turn, largely account for the highly uneven and varied outcomes of land reform policies through time.

1.4 THE RELEVANCE OF THE PHILIPPINE LAND REFORM EXPERIENCE

The Philippine land reform experience provides an excellent case study to examine the problematic of this research. The Philippines still has an important agricultural sector relative to the country’s economy as a whole. During the past decade, the share of the agriculture sector in the Philippine GDP shrank from around one-third in the 1960s–1970s to around one-fifth by 2004. During the same period, the industrial sector registered a marginal increase, eventually stagnating at around one-third. Most of the economy’s development was accounted for by the phenomenal expansion of the services sector, which grew from about 30 percent to around 50 percent of GDP during the same period. The agriculture sector has remained a key sector, with a current share of one-fifth of GDP and two-fifths of employment. But as Balisacan and Hill (2003: 25) have explained, when a broader definition that encompasses agricultural processing and related activities is adopted, the indirect share [of agriculture] rises to about 40 percent and 67 percent, respectively. However, the performance of the Philippine agriculture sector between 1980 and 2000 was dismal, at an average of 1.4 percent annual growth rate (David, 2003: 177; Borras, 2007).

The agrarian structure of the Philippines is marked by widespread landlessness and near-landlessness and inequality, with the Gini coefficient for land-ownership distribution 0.64 in 1988, the year CARP implementation began (Putzel, 1992: 30). The persistence of land monopolies has perpetuated massive poverty in the countryside. The 2005 Philippine poverty analysis and report released by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) showed that the poverty incidence of families fell by 10.5% over the period 1985–2000 (or from 44.2% to 33.7%), but that this was negated by very high population growth rates of 2.36% per year. By 2004, 75 percent of the country’s poor were rural poor. According to the ADB report, Of the 26.5 million poor people in the country in 2000 … 7.1 million were urban and 19.4 million live in rural areas. In other words, nearly 75% of the poor are rural poor (ADB, 2005: 64). And the poverty incidence among farming households during the period 1985–2000 has remained almost unchanged. It was 56.7 percent and 55.8 percent, in 1985 and 2000, respectively (ibid: 98).

Historically, hundreds of peasant revolts have erupted in different parts of the archipelago, most of which were rooted in problems of land and tenancy relations. Yet persistent peasant mobilizations over time have effected only intermittent concessions from the country’s landowning classes and the central government in the combined forms of limited land and tenancy reform and resettlement — as well as persistent efforts at co-optation and repression. None of the political administrations during the past century has ever seriously addressed the underlying cause of the peasant revolts, that is, landlessness. When Marcos was overthrown in 1986, land reform remained most peasants’ main concern. It was during the regime transition in 1986–1988 that the contemporary, most comprehensive land reform program — CARP — was passed into law (in 1988).

The Philippine CARP is among the few state-led land reforms being implemented in the world today. The recent officially reported accomplishment for land redistribution under