Alternative Land Tenure

So, counter to this, a land tenure reform conceived from the perspective of the creation of a real, efficient and democratic alternative supported by prosperous peasant family production must define the role of the state (principal inalienable owner) and that of the institutions and mechanisms of administering access to land and the means of production.

I do not exclude here complex mixed formulas that are specific to each country.

Private ownership of the land may be acceptable—at least where it is established and held to be legitimate. Its redistribution can or should be reviewed, where necessary, as part of an agrarian reform (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya, with respect to Sub-Saharan Africa). I would not even necessarily rule out the controlled clearance of land for agribusiness in all cases. The key lies elsewhere, in the modernisation of peasant family farming and the democratisation of the management of its integration into the national and global economy.

I have no blue print to propose for these areas so I will limit myself to pointing out some of the great problems that this reform poses.

The democratic question is indisputably central to the response to the challenge. It is a complex and difficult question that cannot be reduced to insipid discourse about good governance and electoral pluralism. There is an indisputably cultural aspect to the question: democracy leads to the abolition of ‘customs’ that are hostile to it (prejudice concerning social hierarchies and above all the treatment of women). There are legal and institutional aspects to be considered: the creation of systems of administrative, commercial and personal rights that are consistent with the aims of the plans for social construction and the creation of suitable (generally elected) institutions. However, above all, the progress of democracy will depend definitively on the social power of its defenders.

The organization of peasant movements is, in this respect, absolutely irreplaceable. It is only to the extent that peasants are able to express themselves that progress in the direction known as ‘participative democracy’ (as opposed to the reduction of the problem to the dimension of ‘representative democracy’) will be able to make headway.

The question of relations between men and women is another aspect of the democratic challenge that is no less essential. Peasant ‘family farming’ obviously concerns the family, which is to this day characterised almost everywhere by structures that require the submission of women and the exploitation of their work force. Democratic transformation will not be possible in these conditions without the organised action of the women concerned.

Attention must be given to the question of migration. In general, ‘customary’ rights exclude ‘foreigners’ (that is to say, all those who do not belong to the clans, lineage and families that make up the village community in question) from the right to land or place conditions upon their access to it. Migration resulting from colonial and post colonial development have sometimes been of a such a scale that they have overturned the concepts of ethnic ‘homogeneity’ in the regions affected by this development. Emigrants from outside the state in question (such as the Burkina Be in Ivory Coast) or those who although formally citizens of the same state are of an ‘ethnic’ origin other than that of the regions they have made their homes (like the Hausa in the Nigerian state of Plateau), see their rights to the land that they have cultivated challenged by short-sighted and chauvinistic political movements who also benefit form foreign support. To throw the ‘communitarism’ in question into ideological and political disarray and uncompromisingly denounce the paracultural discourse that underpins it has become one of the indispensable conditions of real democratic progress.

The analyses and propositions set out above only concern the status of tenure or rules on access to land.

These matters are certainly central to debates on the future of agricultural and food production, peasant societies and the people that make them up yet they do not cover all aspects of the challenge. Access to land remains devoid of the potential to transform society if the peasant who benefits from it cannot have access to the essential means of production in suitable conditions (credit, seed, subsidies, access to markets). Both national policies and international negotiations that aim to define the context in which prices and revenues are determined are other aspects of the peasant question.

Further information on these questions that go beyond the scope of the subject we are dealing with here can be found in the writings of Jacques Berthelot—the best critical analyst of projects to integrate agricultural and food production into ‘world’ markets. So we shall restrict ourselves to mentioning the two main conclusions and proposals reached:

10.4.1 Agricultural and Food Production, and Land:

No Ordinary ‘Merchandise’

We cannot allow agricultural and food production, and land to be treated as ordinary ‘merchandise’ and then agree to the need to integrate them into plans for global liberalisation promoted by the dominant powers (the United States and Europe) and transnationalised capital.

The agenda of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which inherited the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995, must quite simply be refused. Opinion in Asia and Africa, beginning with peasant organisations but also all the social and political forces that defend the interests of popular classes and those of the nation (and demands for food sovereignty in particular), all those who have not given up on a development project worthy of the name, must be persuaded that negotiations entered into as part of the WTO agenda can only result in catastrophe for the peoples of Asia and Africa and simply threaten to devastate the lives of more than two and a half billion peasants from the two continents while offering them no other prospect than migration to slums, being shut away in ‘concentration camps’ the construction of which is already planned for the unfortunate future emigrants.

Capitalism has reached a stage where its continued expansion requires the implementation of ‘enclosure’ policies on a world scale like the ‘enclosures’ of the beginning of its development in England except that today the destruction on a world scale of the ‘peasant reserves’ of cheap labour will be nothing less than synonymous with the genocide of half of humanity. On one hand the destruction of the peasant societies of Asia and Africa.

On the other, some billions in extra profit for world capital and its local associates derived from a socially useless production since it is not destined to cover the unsolvable needs of hundreds of millions of extra hungry but only to increase the number of obese in the north and those who emulate them in the south!

So Asian and African states must quite simply be called upon to withdraw from these negotiations and therefore reject decisions taken by the imperialist United States and Europe within the famous ‘Green Rooms’ of the WTO. This voice must be made to be heard and the governments concerned must be forced to ensure that it is heard in the WTO.

10.4.2 Northern Double Standards Towards People of the South

We can no longer accept the behaviour of the major imperialist powers that together assault the people of the South (the United States and Europe) within the WTO. It must be pointed out that the same powers that try to impose their ‘liberalist’ proposals unilaterally upon the countries of the South do not abide by these proposals themselves and behave in a way that can only be described as systematic cheating.

The Farm Bill in the United States and the agricultural policy of the European Union violate the very principles that the WTO is trying to impose on others. The ‘partnership’ projects proposed by the European Union following the Cotonou Convention as of 2008 are really ‘criminal’ to use the strong but fair expression of Jacques Berthelot.

So we can and must hold these powers to account through the authorities of the WTO set up for this purpose. A group of countries from the South not only could but must do it.

Asian and African peasants organised themselves in the previous period of their peoples’ liberation struggles. They found their place in powerful historical blocks which enabled them to be victorious over the imperialism of the time. These blocks were sometimes revolutionary (China and Vietnam) and found their main support in rural areas among the majority classes of middle, poor and landless peasants.

When, elsewhere, they were led by the national bourgeoisie, or those among the rich and middle peasants who aspired to becoming bourgeois, large landowners and ‘customary’ local authorities in the pay of colonisation were isolated.

Having turned over a new leaf, the challenge of the new collective imperialism of the triad (United States, Europe, Japan) will only be lifted if historical blocks form in Asia and Africa that cannot be a remake of the former ones. The definition of the nature of these blocks, their strategies and their immediate and longer term objectives in these new circumstances is the challenge facing the alter-globalist movement and its constituent parts of social forums. A far more serious challenge than a large number of movements engaged in current struggles imagine.

New peasant organisations exist in Asia and Africa that support the current visible struggles. Often, when political systems make it impossible for formal organisations to form, social struggles for the campaign take the form of ‘movements’ with no apparent direction. Where they do exist, these actions and programmes must be more closely examined. What peasant social forces do they represent, whose interests they defend? The majority mass of peasants or the minorities that aspire to find their place in the expansion of dominant global capitalism?

We should be wary of over hasty replies to these complex and difficult questions. We should not ‘condemn’ many organisations and movements under the pretext that they do not have the support of the majority of peasants for their radical programmes. That would be to ignore the demands of the formation of large alliances and strategies in stages. Neither should we subscribe to the discourse of ‘naive alter-globalism’ that often sets the tone of forums and fuels the illusion that the world would be set on the right track only by the existence of social movements. A discourse, it is true, that is more one of numerous NGOs—well-meaning perhaps—than of peasant and worker organisations [November 2004].

Note

The analysis and proposals made in this chapter are only relevant for Asia and Africa.

The agrarian question in Latin America and the Caribbean have their own particular and sometimes unique particularities. Thus, in the Southern Cone of the continent (southern Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile), modernised, mechanised latifundism that benefits from cheap labour is the method of farming that is best adapted to the demands of a liberal global capitalist system that is even more competitive than the agriculture in the United States and Europe.

Alternative Land Tenure

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