Customary vs Private Property Rights? Dynamics and Trajectories of Vernacular Land Markets in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Contemporary discourse on land in Africa is polarized between advocates of tenure reform through state registration of individual titles to land and others who claim that customary or 'communal' tenure is the only check against landlessness among the poor in the African countryside, and that 'pro-poor' land policy should therefore strengthen customary rights to land. This paper draws on a growing body of evidence on the emergence of vernacular rural land sales and rental markets to question assumptions that underlie the non-market 'ideal type' communal tenure model that has historically dominated policy thinking in Africa, and continues to be shared by both sides of the current land tenure reform debate. The paper argues that recognition of the specific characteristics of 'vernacular land markets'– commoditized transfers of land within the framework of customary tenure – is essential if state land policies are to succeed in promoting the interests of the poor.     

累退税、土地市场与地权配置

研究目的:在土地市场存在的情况下,分析累退税制度对地权配置的影响。研究方法:历史文献、逻辑推理与案例比较。研究结果:(1)人头税与土地税实际上均与土地挂钩,导致了事实上的土地累退税;(2)明朝的士人优免制度形成了制度上的土地累退税;(3)豪强与权贵具有更强的逃税和避税能力,造成了事实上的土地累退税;(4)中国近年来具有土地规模累进特征的农业补贴制度,对地权配置的影响起到了与土地累退税类似的效果;(5)具有土地累退税特征的财税制度影响了土地市场运作,促进了地权集中,导致了效率和公平双重损失。研究结论:应改革具有土地规模累进特征的财政补贴政策,实现单位面积农业补贴的均等化。     

Agrarian Change under Globalization: Markets and Insecurity in Turkish Agriculture

This paper argues that deepening commodification in Turkish agriculture has changed the lives of farmers in significant ways. Global circuits have swept away the accustomed networks of information, production and marketing which had been largely established and maintained by comprehensive governmental support policies. New institutions have come into the picture establishing the links between small producers and larger markets. With state policy strengthening the domination of the market, prices and demand patterns fluctuate widely leaving small producers vulnerable to market forces and raising the level of risk and insecurity. This situation brings about a rapid de‐ruralization of the population in most regions of the country. In the fertile coastal strip of the southern and western provinces, however, commercial opportunities introduced by global circuits have led to a thriving market in products, land, and labour. Farming of vegetables and fruits for domestic and European markets dominate agricultural production. Seasonal employment, in tourism and in labour‐intensive crops, supplement household incomes, permitting the rural population to remain in the countryside.     

Illegibly legible: Outcomes of a land records modernisation programme in South India

This article analyses an initiative in 2017 to update and digitise textual land records in Telangana, a south Indian state. Its premise is that experiments to modernise land records have not met with pre-determined standards of success due, primarily, to the historically evolved contradictions around land as a resource and a commodity. In countries like India, the colonial policies on land and the post-colonial success of landlords to manipulate land records had already left the post-War task of ensuring conclusive land titles intractable. In more recent times, however, the agenda of land records modernisation has been absorbed by neoliberalism, which aims to create free land markets and replace traditional subsidies with direct cash transfers. This article shows that, consequently, the task of land records modernisation in Telangana became disembedded from agendas of agrarian egalitarianism and was rendered more complex—historical errors and exclusions were reproduced in new ways; technocratic solutions of the bureaucracy made governmental processes opaque; landed sections continued to subvert implementation; tenants were excluded from the land titles; and there were fears that the scheme would be misused to ease corporate land acquisition. Land records modernisation remains important for agrarian reform, but its success remains contingent on a greater appreciation among policymakers for the historical and political economy aspects of land ownership and possession.     

Fictitious commodification and agrarian change: Indigenous peoples and land markets in Highland Ecuador

Creating private property rights and establishing land markets were fundamental to the historical development of capitalism in the Global North and remain at the centre of capitalist development in the Global South. This article contributes to debates about these processes by analysing the relationship between land markets and indigenous peoples in Highland Ecuador. Building on Karl Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities, it elaborates a new concept that makes an analytical distinction between the activation and development of land markets. The former refers to the occasional participation of actors in markets to secure land, whereas the latter relates to the establishment and expansion of markets that regulate the distribution and value of land through market prices. Focusing on indigenous land struggles in the late 20th century, this article shows that the activation of land markets created opportunities for indigenous peasants to secure land, whereas the development of land markets closed them down. Social and class differentiation among the highland indigenous population increased through this contradictory process. The article connects this historical analysis to recent developments in Ecuador to contribute to empirical and theoretical debates about contemporary land struggles and agrarian change elsewhere in the Global South.     

State,war, and land dispossession: The multiple paths to land concentration

We focus on the role of the state in land dispossession during war. State agencies promote land accumulation not only through coercive paths, but also by combining political and market mechanisms. Each mechanism may link the state with different actors and coalitions. We illustrate how this worked in Tibú, a Colombian municipality in which violence against civilians and land accumulation took place in more or less distinct phases. The case highlights the fact that land accumulation during war is not only achieved through coercion. At the same time, it shows the importance of identifying the specific coalitions through which states establish their presence in contested territories during war. We explain such variation as resulting from the types of alliances and coalitions that the state establishes with different sets of stakeholders, and the aims pursued by coalition actors.     

The Quest to Bring Land under Social and Political Control: Land Reform Struggles of the Past and Present in Ecuador

Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, the paper characterizes these struggles as the attempt to increase the social and political control of land in the face of mounting commodification. The movement started in the 1960s and remains evident in Ecuador today. Exploring land reform in Ecuador from this theoretical perspective provides new insight into land struggles in the country and contributes to debates over land reforms of the past and present elsewhere in the Global South.     

Reconstructing the Maize Market in Rural Mexico

The transition in Mexico from a maize market once characterized by heavy state intervention along the entire maize–tortilla chain to the ‘free market’ of today has been a long and complex process. Over two decades, the production of maize has seen a radical transition both in the geographical location of maize agriculture and the type of farmers growing maize. In this paper, I argue that the restructuring of the domestic maize supply is due to policy decisions to support private agents in the maize market; hence the state did not withdraw its involvement but, rather, has had a key role in the construction of the ‘free’ maize market, with the result that domestic supply for the market is concentrated in the hands of relatively few agents and in relatively few regions. I discuss the background to these policies and analyse the programmes implemented by the state agency ASERCA (Apoyos y Servicios a la Comercialización Agropecuaria) that support the commercialization of maize.     

Emerging Class Relations in the Mekong River Delta of Vietnam: A Network Analysis

Neoclassical theory has not succeeded in explaining the relationship between increasing landlessness and class differentiation in rural southern Vietnam. In this paper, we take a relational approach, using statistical techniques from social network theory, to examine the governance structure of markets in a commune of Tra Vinh province in the Mekong River Delta. We demonstrate that new opportunities provided by the process of market development are accessible only to those households controlling the right bundles of resources in the core agricultural production and trading system of the area. Further, industrial employment is available only to those who have, at some stage, controlled land, while those who have never participated in the land and rice markets are confined to casual agricultural labour. The governance structure, embedded informally in relatively stable market networks, therefore reproduces class divisions.     

Family farmers' strategies to develop autonomy through agroecological and solidarity economy practices: The case of BioVida in the Ecuadorian Andes

Considering the global restructuring affecting agrarian landscapes, we build on the concept of autonomy proposed by van der Ploeg and colleagues (but extended and critically complemented) to analyse how family farmers can build this autonomy to face rural capitalist tendencies and maintain their activities and identity. We offer insights from a case study in the Ecuadorian Andes, the BioVida organization that is linked to agroecological and social and solidarity economy movements. Our findings show that family farming autonomy is not being achieved homogeneously for the whole household but must be analysed through an intersectional approach. Furthermore, there are simultaneous processes to achieve different degrees of autonomy and (inter-)dependency, which are co-constitutive along gender and age lines and are conditioned by structural constraints. Therefore, for our case study area, agribusiness and family farming processes and spaces seem to operate co-constitutively rather than antagonistically in practical terms. Agroecology-based achievements so far act as a localized buffer against adversity rather than an emancipative territorial project of autonomy.     

Vertical Integration and Sunk Capital in Transition Economies

In recent years a distinction has been made in the development literature between “Asian” poverty, which is thought to be the result of high rural population densities and high rates of landlessness, and “African” poverty, which is more the result of sparse populations farming poor quality land and cut off by inadequate infrastructure from markets for goods, labour and credit. This paper pursues this distinction in the context of Indonesia and points out that in recent years the highest incidence of poverty has been found not in the densely settled islands of Java and Bali, but in the more remote and less populated provinces in the eastern part of the archipelago. This paper explores the correlates of poverty by province in Indonesia in 1996 and finds support for the view that the poorest provinces are those characterized by low population densities, undeveloped markets, low road densities and low educational attainment. The policy implications of these findings are examined in the final part of the paper.     

Adoption of agricultural land management technologies by smallholder farmers in the Jos Plateau,Nigeria

Against a background of growing concern about the adverse effects of agricultural land degradation due to accelerated soil erosion, nutrient depletion and high population pressure, farmers in the Jos Plateau, Nigeria have adopted biological and structural land management practices, though the degree of adoption of such practices varies from one farm household to another. This study, based on a survey of 150 farm households, employed a stepwise multiple linear regression model to analyse the factors significantly influencing the adoption of land management technologies. The results of the analysis revealed four variables, namely, extension service, agricultural labour force, accelerated soil erosion and out-migration, explaining nearly 90% of the variation in the range of land management technologies adopted. The first three of these variables have positive influences on adoption. Extension service appeared to be the strongest, impacting on skills in the agricultural labour force. Policy recommendations are made in line with the findings of the analysis.     

The Olive Oil Sector Facing New International Market Challenges

Abstract

This article explores the new economic context in which international olive oil marketing strategies are framed. The underlying premises are that the growing liberalization of international trade is inducing an emergent globalization process in product trading, and that business strategies are increasingly influenced by a more demand-driven food chain. The first part discusses the macro-factors conditioning olive oil trade on a worldwide scale, surveying the main changes in market regulation schemes as well as in recent world product supply and demand trends. The second part addresses a series of microeconomic and organizational factors shaping business strategies with respect to product marketing, placing special emphasis on quality as a key factor for expansion into potential markets.     

A generalized method for valuing agricultural farms under uncertainty

The opacity of the farm market means that valuations are based primarily on expert estimates rather than on actual transaction prices. The valuation method based on the two cumulative distribution functions (VMTCDF), created by Ballestero (1971), improves the synthetic method based on estimating the market value of an asset by establishing a proportional relation between the asset and one external variable. However, in most cases the expert must consider multiple external variables. This paper proposes a definitive extension to k indexes with a methodology particularly applicable to the field of valuation of non-market goods or markets where little information is available as may be the case with the valuation of agricultural land. The contribution is illustrated with an empirical example.     

Recent trends in the supply of land for industrial development in Hong Kong: A case study in planned decentralization

Summary

Although free enterprise remains the dominant characteristic of the Hong Kong economy, new land supply is controlled largely by the Hong Kong Government. Rather than establish a detailed system of development plans and controls, the Government has been able to achieve substantial decentralization of housing and industry through the location of new land release. The evidence suggests that industrial developers have been willing to build and industrialists to locate in decentralized areas, especially those close to the main urban areas. Furthermore, although vacancy rates are generally higher and rental levels lower in decentralized compared to centralized locations, the extent of the differences over time is not as pronounced as might be expected. Indeed, the overall strength of demand for industrial land, other than in the recent slump, has necessitated special policies to protect land for low‐density industrial users in decentralized locations. As planned decentralization approaches completion, attention is beginning to focus upon redevelopment in the older urban areas and upon the consequences of the Sino‐British Joint Declaration of 1985. Overall, recent land policies in Hong Kong offer the British observer some useful indications of the impact of government intervention in land use on existing property markets.     

Preface

The paper examines the main issues surrounding distributional effects in the domains of natural resource management and land policies, agricultural technology and research policies, agricultural market and trade policies, and consumer‐oriented policies, including standards, subsidies, and labeling. Agriculture is drifting into an ever more drastic bifurcation at a global level and within many countries. Correcting that bifurcation will require large investments in rural areas and rural people, in institutions, and in information and biological technologies accessible by the poor in the world's smallholder sector. Large and growing national and international inequalities related to agriculture and rural areas threaten peace, growth, and sustainable development.     

中国城乡土地市场一体化政策模拟国内研究综述

研究目的:综述城乡土地市场一体化政策模拟在国内研究的进展。研究方法:文献资料法、对比法。研究结论:研究中国城乡土地一体化市场对推进中国城乡一体化建设具有重要意义。     

Exploring Transition and Change in a Complex Traditional Market: The Case of the Rice Market in Bangladesh

This paper explores the unaddressed question of how the large, complex paddy‐rice market in Bangladesh is able to transform itself and evolve, in the face of changing risks and incentives, into a better‐functioning market system. It notes significant but opposing trends over two decades in different areas, particularly in terms of market structure, trade circuits and exchange relations. Evidence of a sharp decline in tied transactions points to the growing importance of impersonal exchange. The underlying causes of these changes are explored, with particular reference to microfinance, remittances, rural roads and mobile telephony.     

Stop and Go Agricultural Policies with a Land Market

This article studies the design of farm policy in the presence of asymmetric information about farmers' productivity, a government objective to insure farmers a minimum "parity" income, an endogenous land rent, and diminishing returns on alternative (nonprogram crop) land uses. In this setting, acreage set asides are never part of an optimal farm policy, although compensated acreage limits are. When there are new farmer entrants who cannot be excluded from farm programs, optimal policy takes the form of a pure voluntary acreage limitation—or "buyout"—program in which high-cost producers participate and low-cost producers do not.