What a Little Land Can Do
By TINA ROSENBERG
The poorest people in the world are those who don’t have land. In India, landlessness is a better predictor of poverty than illiteracy or belonging to castes at the bottom of society. At least 17 million rural households in India are completely landless, living on others’ land and working as sharecroppers or day laborers tending other peoples’ crops.
Landlessness is a huge problem all over the world. More equal distribution of land is a valuable goal — it is efficient in both
fighting poverty and
producing food.
But redistributing land is one of the most difficult and controversial of all political tasks. A history of land reform is a history of revolution. The concentration of land in the hands of the rich is a prime source of conflict. When a leftist movement has won, its first action has often been land reform — the further to the left the new government, the less likely it is to compensate landowners (and the more likely to shoot them, which was the norm in China and the Soviet Union).
But confiscatory land reform is not the only kind. Many programs have paid landowners market value for their land. Perhaps the world’s most influential architect of a more democratic land reform is the University of Washington law professor Roy Prosterman, who founded the Rural Development Institute, now known as Landesa. Prosterman and his group have worked with dozens of countries to design market-based land reform. But his ideas, too, have been used for political ends; if you know Prosterman’s name, it’s because you’ve heard of Land to the Tiller, the United States-backed land reform in Vietnam during the war. The United States adopted Prosterman’s ideas in Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador to turn peasants away from leftist guerrillas.
Landesa.orgTop, Land in West Bengal, India, before the Landesa micro-plot program was implemented in 2010; bottom, nearly two years later.
Today, political forces are arrayed against land reform. India, for example, had a land reform program since the 1960s that set ceilings on land ownership. The government could expropriate anything above the ceiling; compensation was typically well below market value. But the law was put to wide use only in the few states with Communist governments. “With very small exceptions, the ceiling surplus approach was not going anywhere because people who owned the land and stood to lose were much more politically powerful than those who were going to gain,” said Tim Hanstad, the president and chief executive of Landesa.
Democratic land reform has a different problem: buying large swaths of land at market price is too costly. But hundreds of millions of people still lack land. Is there a more politically realistic way to help them? Landesa thinks there is.
Subhankari Nag lives in the village of Burdwan, West Bengal, about 70 miles from Kolkata. Until this year, the Nags — Subhankari, her husband Uttam, and their eighth-grade son and sixth-grade daughter — had spent their entire family life squatting on other people’s lands. They had so little space that Subhankari even had trouble finding a place to cook meals. Uttam was a day laborer on other men’s farms, earning very little. What was worse than his wages, he said in a phone interview through a translator, was the affront to the family’s dignity. “When I was out working, people would come to my children and wife and say ‘this is not your place. Your father cannot buy land for you — go away.’”
The Nag family did go away. In the very beginning of 2012 they moved to a plot of land given to them by the West Bengal government, a few hundred meters from where they had been living. It has a water pump, and electricity is on the way. They now have a garden where they grow papaya, eggplant, pumpkin, cucumber and other vegetables. They have two cows and three goats; the family has added milk, cheese, vegetables and fruit to its diet. The government gave the family trees to plant. Subhankari has space for a loom. “As a village girl, I knew the work of weaving clothes and kitchen gardening,” she said. “But I couldn’t do it. Now I make 200 rupees a week weaving (about $3.60), and the garden, cows and goats bring extra income.” She spends most of the money keeping her children in school.
The Nags still live in a tiny thatch hut. “But it doesn’t matter,” said Subhankari. “It’s really thrilling to stay in my house. I am confident nobody will come to say bad words to my children and ask us to go away.”
Uttam said that people in the village still taunt the family because it got its land from the government. “But they have to pay attention to us because we are landowners,” he said. “We are equal.”
What is remarkable about the Nag family’s new life is that the plot of land that has been so transformative is a twentieth of an acre — the size of a tennis court. All over the world, said Hanstad, a microplot can have outsize effects; in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s, small dacha garden plots made up 3 percent of the agricultural land but produced 25 to 30 percent of Russia’s agricultural value. “They kept that country fed,” said Hanstad.
In 2000, Landesa began researching the impact of microplots in India. It then took its
findings to the governments of four states and encouraged them to try a different kind of land reform. “The conventional wisdom had been that in order to provide meaningful benefits you’d need a full-size farm,” said Hanstad. “But when families had a small fraction of an acre they are often able to use that as a big bump up and foundation for a path out of poverty.”
“The family gets a permanent address,” said Supriya Chattopadhyay, who manages advocacy and communications for Landesa in West Bengal. “That’s very important — if a family wants to get any support from a government program, the first thing it needs is a permanent address.” Women traditionally do not leave their homes to work, so having a garden right outside their door gives the family a second income, he said. “And they get social recognition, social dignity” — for some families the most important factor of all.
The government doesn’t have to spend much to buy a tenth of an acre — in India, between $200 and $600. And there is no expropriation, so the program does not lower property values, cause legal uncertainties about ownership or create political opposition. Landesa has worked with four state governments in India to help them set up microplot programs — so far, about 200,000 families have received one.
Many governments around the world offer help to rural families to build houses. The research suggests that that money would be better used buying them microplots instead. Poor people have always built their own houses: they move into whatever shelter they can rig up, stockpile building materials as they can afford them and make gradual improvements. But they cannot create their own land. And of the two, land makes a far bigger difference.
Tiny plots are not ideal. Families do better with more land; even very small increases in land size matter. But microplots are a feasible cure for landlessness when more ambitious programs have failed.
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
