By Albert T. Armstrong
April 2008

To read the entire report, open the pdf file at the bottom of the executive summary. To order additional copies contact Food First Books directly.
Price: $5.00 plus $4.05 shipping and handling within the U.S..

About the Author

by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D.
September 2007

Download as a PDF

Introduction

Many of the current critiques of the World Bank's "market-assisted" programs for land reform center on the contradictions between the Bank's neo-liberal agrarian discourse and the poor distributive results of its projects on the ground . Taking the Bank to task for the inconsistency between its mission to alleviate rural poverty and the regressive nature of its land reform programs is important, not only because it can help amplify the voices of the landless, but because it helps expose the inherent hypocrisies in the Bank's non-distributive approach to economic growth and rural development, overall.

However, these critiques do not necessarily shed light on why the Bank continually implements these failed programs with such insistence. Simply pointing to the "Washington Consensus" does not provide a specific understanding of the role of market-based land reform within the Bank's national development strategies. Without a structural analysis of the Bank's agenda, it is difficult to understand the political scope of its land reform programs. Further, it is important to consider the Bank's suite of policies and projects in a particular country in order to know what role land reform (or lack of it) might play in the Bank's overall strategy. A market-based land reform project may be an agrarian failure for the peasantry, yet still be quite successful in terms of helping restructure the social and economic institutions in a country's hinterlands in favor of agribusiness, tourism, or extractive industries, for example.

Download as a PDF

January 2007

Bryan Newman, BA
Asian Studies
University of North Carolina

Alongside India’s tremendous middle class growth and the much-celebrated boom of its IT sector, a quiet emergency of debt-driven suicide has taken hold in the countryside. It is estimated that between 1993 and 2003, as many as 100,000 indebted Indian farmers took their own lives. Many of these farmers died consuming the very same pesticides they had bought to use on their fields.

Other Development Reports can be ordered from our on-line bookstore.

Download in PDF

Development Report No. 14

Cuba's New Agricultural Revolution

The Transformation of Food Crop Production in Contemporary Cuba

Laura J. Enríquez

Department of Sociology

University of California

Berkeley, California

May 2000

Development Report No.12:

Cultivating Havana: Urban Agriculture and Food Security in the Years of Crisis

By Catherine Murphy

1999