8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
1/22
The ‘land sovereignty’ alternative: a proposition for discussion
Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco and Sofia Monsalve1
12 February 2014 draft
Abstract
In this essay we raise questions about the strengths and limitations of some current
analytical and political frameworks employed by key social movement activists in their
struggles for land control in order to understand better, and mobilize effectively around,
land issues in the current global context. We offer more questions than answers, framed
loosely as propositions for open-ended discussion. We that it will contribute towards
moving forward – in research and political actions -- with some proposed alternatives on
the global land front. We introduce and offer an initial discussion about ‘land
sovereignty’: why we need to transition the people’s demand for land from a largelydefensive struggle to one that is both defensive and pro-active struggle, from a demand
for ‘land tenure security’ to land sovereignty, a broad framework and advocacy
campaign that we hope can capture both the defensive struggle of the rural poor
“people’s counter-enclosure campaign”, and their pro-active struggle—“people’s
enclosure campaign”. The notion of land sovereignty, cast here generally in normative
terms, goes beyond the conventional notion of ‘land struggle as mainly farmland
struggle’ – to encompass a much broader conception of land and framing of land
struggles: rural agricultural, rural non-agricultural, urban, and peri-urban, bringing in
a much wider cast of actors from various social classes and groups. In this sense, its
breadth is akin to that of the food sovereignty political project. In fact, we suggest that
land sovereignty is the land pillar of food sovereignty.
Introduction
The convergence of the food, financial and energy crises in recent years has put the land
question back onto the center stage of development discourse. This is especially so at a
1 Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is an associate professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and a
fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI), [email protected]. Jennifer C. Franco is the coordinator of
the Agrarian Justice Program of the Transnational Institute (TNI), [email protected]. Sofia Monsalve is
the coordinator of the Land Program of Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) – International
Section, [email protected]. This paper is a slightly revised version of a 2010 paper by Borras and Franco published by TNI as a Discussion Paper which in turn bulds on the authors’ body of work on the issue of
land grabs. This current version is the latest attempt of the authors to develop some parts of the paper a
little further. In the context of this work-in-progress undertaking, a third author came on board, Sofia
Monsalve. The current incomplete draft is a paper prepared for the international workshop at MIT in
Boston on 27 Feb to 2 March 2014. This current incomplete draft is not appropriately referenced, in the
main text and in the bibliography. This version is not for broader circulation and is not for citation without
authors’ permission. As we submit this 12 February 2014 version of the paper to the MIT workshop
organizers, we continue to work on this work-in-progress paper. For queries, please get in touch with the
authors.
1
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
2/22
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
3/22
struggles for land control in order to understand better, and mobilize effectively around,
land issues in the current global context. We offer more questions than answers, framed
loosely as propositions for open-ended discussion. We that it will contribute towardsmoving forward – in research and political actions -- with some proposed alternatives on
the global land front. We introduce and offer an initial discussion about ‘land
sovereignty’: why we need to transition the people’s demand for land a largely defensivestruggle to one that is both defensive and pro-active struggle, from a demand for ‘land
tenure security’ to land sovereignty, a broad framework and advocacy campaign that we
hope can capture both the defensive struggle of the rural poor “people’s counter-enclosure
campaign”, and their pro-active struggle—“people’s enclosure campaign”. Landsovereignty is the land pillar of food sovereignty. As such, it is ultimately framed in the
context of people’s (human) rights, broadly cast.
Context and basis for reframing land issues
A convergence of the global financial, environmental, energy, and food in recent years
has contributed to a dramatic revaluation of and rush to control land. Transnational andnational economic actors from various business sectors such as oil and auto, mining and
forestry, food and chemical, and bioenergy are eagerly acquiring; or declaring their
intention to acquire, large swathes of land on which to build, maintain, or extend large-scale extractive and agro-industrial enterprises.
As a result, we are seeing a rise in the volume of cross-border large-scale land deals.Various estimates placed the total lands being transacted in this context from a few
million to several hundred million hectares, although just how much land actually
changed control in this context remains unknown—warranting empirical investigation.There question of measurement of the extent of land grabs has itself become the subject
of recent debates (see, e.g. Scoones et al. 2013, Oya 2013, Edelman 2013, Anseeuw et al
2013, and Rulli and D’Odorico 2013). But while domestic capital and nationalgovernments are heavily involved in land deals (Wolford et al. 2013), transnational
corporations (TNC) are a key actor. On many occasions, we see a close partnership (or
collusion) between transnational and domestic capital with national governments. In
many cases, national governments are actively shopping around for possible landinvestors.
At the same time that the global land grab is well underway, sparking controversy as itunfolds, the main storyline is being transformed. There is a perceptible attempt in
mainstream development circles to shift the discourse from alarm over global land
grabbing, to acceptance of it. This new acceptance is founded on the idea that there is animportant ‘opportunity’ in the ongoing land deals for rural development; this opportunity
must be grabbed, as it were. Moreover, the emphasis in this changing narrative is on
gathering ‘multiple stakeholders’ to unite around a set of basic principles as a step toward
instituting an international ‘Code of Conduct’ (CoC) that can craft so-called ‘win-win’development outcomes. This re-framing is best illustrated by a statement made by IFPRI
(2009) when it proposed its version of a CoC, calling for “making virtue out of
necessity”.
3
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
4/22
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
5/22
In the midst of emerging debate explained above, we reiterate some messages that may
have implications for research, policy advocacy and political actions. First, amidst
popular outcry against the current global land grab, it is important, even critical, todifferentiate the competing views, strategies, and alternatives put forward by various
individuals and groups. While at a glance they may all be raising criticisms of the
(trans)national commercial land deals, they do not necessarily share the sameinterpretations as to the nature and implications of the phenomenon, tasks to be done, and
strategic alternatives (Borras and Franco 2010a; Borras, Franco and Wang 2013). The
underlying reasons for these differences can be class-based, as in the case between the
now defunct International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) and ViaCampesina, or ideological-political, as in the case between La Via Campesina and the
World Bank or IFPRI. In terms of research, the two opposing camps will logically pursue
different research questions and methodologies, propose competing policy proposals, andtake competing political actions: one is likely to reinforce, not undermine, existing
development framework while the other may attempt to subvert the dominant
development model and construct a fundamentally different alternative. The future
political dynamics on research, policymaking, and political actions around (trans)nationalcommercial land transactions will be largely (re)shaped by the dynamics between these
competing camps. It is equally important however to go beyond these polarized positions,
and critically examine heterogeneity of positions within these camps and between them.The same class-based and ideological fault-lines that separate key broad camps from each
other are found—though in much lesser extent and intensity—within each camp (see
Borras, Franco and Wang 2013). It is crucial to emphasize the diversity of positionswithin and between various camps among social movements and civil society especially
because the emerging literature, policy and political discourse seem to erroneously
simplify the politics of social movements and civil society in relation to the global landgrab, as explained in Borras and Franco (2013).
Second, the nature, direction, pace, and extent of changes in land use in the context of(trans)national commercial land deals are diverse and complex—and cannot be captured
by the popularly protested conversion of land use from ‘land for food production for
consumption and local market’ to land ‘for food and biofuel production for export’
(Borras and Franco 2012). It is relevant to map out the broad patterns of land use change,emphasizing the terms of the rural poor’s insertion into the emerging food-biofuel agro-
industrial complex, in the broader context of food regimes (McMichael 2009), livelihood
displacement, or indeed dispossession caused by the latter, regardless of whether the processes are driven by TNCs and foreign governments or not, and whether food and
biofuel production is geared for export or not. Focusing our query this way will
necessarily require a political economy framework, which in turn uses a class analyticlens. This will entail disaggregating concepts that are popularly, and rather casually, used
in everyday discourses of civil society, policy experts and some researchers, e.g., ‘local
community’ or ‘local people’. In many places, ‘local community’ or ‘local people’
include kulaks, cacique, chiefs, petty landlords, traders, lumpen elements, andmoneylenders who may all want to shift to commercial food-fuel production and
exchange, for export or domestic markets, or to other related extractive activities, perhaps
in contrast to the position of many small scale farmers. Local communities are usually
5
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
6/22
comprised of social classes and groups with different, often competing, interests and
varying degrees of political power. These different social classes and groups have highly
differentiated access to, control over, and use of land resources. Hence, changes in landuse and land property relations brought about by the emerging food-fuel agro-industrial
complex will have a differentiated impact on these groups; partly because of this, various
groups are likely to eventually have different views of and political reactions to thecurrent (trans)national commercial land deals. The only way to have a firm grasp of what
is going on at the local communities therefore is to deploy in our analysis the four key
interlinked questions in agrarian political economy as explained by Bernstein (2010):
Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the wealthcreated?
Third, and partly following James Scott (1998), instead of reproducing the neat andsimplified grid, standard records, and processes on land property as conceived and
enforced by the state, it is critical to take the complex and messy actually existing land-
based social relations as the starting point of our analysis and political actions —
regardless of state-sanctioned or imposed land property categories. By doing this, we will be able to directly engage with the most appropriate unit of critical inquiry and analysis,
and the key object of any policy reform and political action, namely: existing land-based
social relations. By doing so, we will be able to understand better the political dynamicsof the nature, direction, pace, and extent of land property relations change as a result of
(trans)national commercial land deals.
Fourth, it seems to us that while land reform – or even agrarian reform – has become an
important rallying call by many organized movements of the rural poor today, this
concept has been rendered quite narrow and limited. For example, contemporary landgrabbing activities are being carried out, or are planned to be carried out, in settings
where successful land reforms have been implemented in the past, such as Brazil,
Mozambique, Philippines and India — just to name a few. Therefore, conventional landreform cannot be a panacea for land grabbing. Land reform is more important than ever,
but alone cannot represent as a comprehensive rallying framework against contemporary
land grabbing. Conventional land reform is taken to mean what Griffin et al. (2002, 279–
80) have defined: redistributing ‘land ownership from large private landowners to small peasant farmers and landless agricultural workers,’ emphasizing that it is ‘concerned with
a redistribution of wealth.’ The bias is towards formally privatized large tracts of land,
such as Latin America’s latifundia. This is the strength of land reform — but this is alsoits weakness. Most agricultural land in the world has non-private (state, public,
communal, common, and so on) institutional property arrangements. In fact, much of the
targeted lands in the on-going global land grab are non-private lands, outside the usualdomain of conventional land reform. In addition, the conventional notion of land reform
is always associated with agricultural landholdings in developing countries. It is therefore
a non-starter – politically speaking, at least at present – in contemporary developed
countries, such as Europe or North America where, as discussed earlier in the paper, arealso confronted by major land concentration issue. The many urban and peri-urban land
issues, as well as rural-but-not-agriculture related land issues, such as land for hiusing
issues, are not captured by the conventional land reform frame. Therefore, to confront
6
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
7/22
global land grabbing and land concentration with a land reform demand — as is the case
among civil society groups — is analytically and politically weak.
When using the term land reform or agrarian reform, some groups such as La Via
Campesina implicitly mean more than just large private landholdings. However, without
an appropriate concept, what is meant by land reform is unclear and so is less effective, intheir campaign and lobby work. For example, Via Campesina (2008: 10) explained:
We will fight for a comprehensive genuine agrarian reform that upholds the rights
of women, indigenous peoples, peasants, fisherfolk, workers, pastoralists,migrants and future generations and enables the coexistence of different
communities in their territories. Customary rights to territory must be recognized
but must be adapted if they discriminate against women or marginalizedcommunities. Agrarian reform must ensure priority in the use of land, water,
seeds and livestock breeds, etc. for food production and other local needs rather
than production for export (Via Campesina, 2008: 10).
Not only is there a certain amount of discrepancy as to the definition of land reform, there
are inherent problems in conventional land reforms. One fundamental problem in land
policy/land and reform discourses is that states have always engaged in trying to simplify — ‘make legible’ — existing complex, dynamic and fluid land-based social relations as
part of the logic of modern state-building (Scott 1998). In fact, Anna Tsing (2002),
pointed out that these types of land policy processes are more interested in ‘things’, suchas papers, title deeds, and so on — even when these simplified property categorizations
do not actually conform to existing realities; for example declaring as ‘empty’ a public
forest despite the historical presence of communities therein.
Fifth and finally, and as already emphasized in the beginning of this paper, while land
grabbing is indeed a raging and urgent land issue today – it is not the only urgent andimportant one. The issue of generic ‘land concentration’ generally caused by structural
and institutional processes outside of what can be broadly defined as land grabs remains
perhaps the more widespread and most urgent land issue today. Two sets of studies have
reiterated this point empirically. The first one is the FAO studies on land issues in 17countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, an abridged version of the
collection is published as special issue of Canadian Journal of Development Studies
(CJDS) in December 2012. The other is the action research compilation by the EuropeanCoordination Via Campesina (ECVC) and the land advocacy campaign alliance ‘Hands-
Off The Land’ (HOTL) and published by the Transnational Institute in June 2013 which
is a study of land grabbing and land concentration in European Union (Franco and Borras2013). This is a critical point: not all urgent and important land issues are land grabbing;
not all non-land grab land issues are non-important. It is crucial to look at contemporary
land issues from the interlinked processes of land grabbing and land concentration. This
has a far-reaching implication in terms of what is to be done about alternatives.
In short, land has been put back onto the centre stage of development debate, provoked
by the recent convergence of multiple crises, resulting in land grabbing and continuing
7
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
8/22
land concentration. The tendency among several rural social movements and their allies
is to quickly re-argue for the conventional land reform, as the counter policy framework
that would protect the land rights of the rural poor. This in our view is relevant andimportant, but is also limited and very weak. We need a comprehensive and flexible
concept that can serve as political platform.
‘Land Sovereignty’ as an alternative conceptual framework
In so many ways, the conventional land reform discourse has internalized the same
problems of many state land policies; it avoids complex existing land-based socialrelations and relies heavily on official standard censuses and data on land property
relations. As a result, land reform scholarship misses a significant portion of actually
existing social relations that are not captured in these official records, which should bethe object of redistributive reforms. The inherent problem within conventional land
reforms has become an important one in the midst of contemporary (trans)national
commercial land deals, especially because the non-private (‘public lands’) have become
the principal target of enclosure. Instead, we need a framework that takes the messy,complex, actually existing land-based social relations as the starting point, while
emphasizing rural poor people’s effective access to, control over, and use of land. We
therefore propose a shift from the call for ‘land tenure security’—or indeed, ‘landgovernance’—to a call for ‘land sovereignty’ (Borras and Franco 2010b).
Our starting point is to problematize the notion of the conventional call for ‘land tenuresecurity’. In the land policy literature in general, ‘security’ means providing, promoting
and/or protecting the property rights of the exclusive owners and/or users of the land. It
usually means individual and private property rights that include the right to alienate. Itmeans commodification of land, transforming land into something marketable. Titles are
the most important expression of this so-called security. The problem with the notion of
‘security’ is that it can mean anything, pro- or anti-poor. Land tenure security can meanthe property security of big landlords living in the capital city, and relying on tenants or
farm workers to make the land productive. Land tenure security can also mean the
property security of corrupt government officials, who made property claims over vast
tracts of lands in far-flung public lands through anomalous deals and for speculative purposes. Security in land property can also mean security of the banks that are selling
credit for profit, and need collateral in case of payment default. In the current context of
global land grabbing ‘security’ can, and in fact always, refers to the security of(trans)national capital invested in land, for example, for 99 year lease or outright sale. In
fact, in the mainstream economic discourse security around land property almost always
means security of the elite owners or claimants, most of whom are absentee owners orclaimants.
Looking more critically into the historic demands for land by the various strata of the
rural-based working classes, against our critical re-evaluation of the ‘tenure security’concept, we realize that we need an alternative concept that better captures what we
mean: effective control by the working poor people over land where they live in and
work. Despite the awkwardness of the term, we argue that ‘land sovereignty’ captures the
8
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
9/22
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
10/22
The strengths and weaknesses of state-centric and community-oriented views on land can
be seen as well from the lens of ‘rights’ and ‘empowerment’, two important ingredients
of a land sovereignty concept. In this context, we build on Jonathan Fox’s (2007: 335)argument, as follows:
“Rights and empowerment do not necessarily go together. Institutions maynominally recognize rights that actors, because of imbalances in power relations,
are not able to exercise in practice. Conversely, actors may be empowered in the
sense of having the experience and capacity to exercise rights, while lacking
institutionally recognized opportunities to do so. Formal institutions can helpestablish rights that challenge informal power relations, while those informal
structures can also undermine formal structures.”
Thus, we do not stop with the nation-state; we bring the ‘people’ into the definition of
land sovereignty, and so the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’. Here, by ‘people’ we mean
the working classes. By combining formal state sovereignty with popular sovereignty, we
are able to address some of the key concerns raised in state-centric and community-oriented approaches to land control, and also address issues around rights and
empowerment.
If the bottom line principle is for working people to have effective access, control and use
of land, then the property rights regimes will be necessarily diverse within and between
communities from one society to another, depending on current structural andinstitutional situations conditioned historically. Here, again, it does not make sense to
have the conventional land reform as a catch-all demand or call, nor is the notion of
‘territory’. In terms of systems of property rights then these can be communal,community, state, or private property rights. In settings marked by high concentration of
private landholdings, redistribution through land reform to create individual freehold
private property of small plots for land reform beneficiaries make a lot of sense – as inmost capitalist-oriented land reforms historically, such as those in South Korea decades
ago to many of land reform settlements in contemporary Brazil. But conventional land
reform did not only create individualized private property for small plots. There are
several examples historically of non-individualized private property land reforms, fromthe Cuban and Chinese examples in the 1950s to the Mexican ejido for the most part of
the 20th century. Effecting real access, control and use in some settings does not have put
an end to the property claims of landowning elites; this can be achieved by reforming theterms of tenancy or leasehold arrangements, as in the case of West Bengal. Maintaining
communal or community control and arrangement within patches of state or private land
can also be a possible modality, such as in the case of contemporary reservas campesinas (peasant reserves) in Colombia, several initiatives around community land banking in
northeast Thailand, or some relatively successful cases of indigenous peoples’ land
claims in the contemporary Philippines, or ethnic minority forestland claims in Vietnam.
Lands can remain formally owned and/or controlled by the state, but effectively accessed,controlled and used by working people, as in the case of contemporary Vietnam and
China. If we see people’s land control from this perspective what we see is multiple and
10
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
11/22
diverse forms of social relations – and thus, formal and informal institutional
arrangements to govern such relations between and within the state and society.
The convergence of multiple crises has, as we explained in the beginning of the paper, re-
valued land in a big way. This pertains to various types of land – and not just agricultural
land. For example, landless rural plantation workers – from the sugarcane belt of Brazil,to the oil palm enclaves of Indonesia, to the banana plantation zone of the Philippines –
may not be interested in agricultural to farm, but are certainly keen on having a piece of
land as housing plots. There indeed is a plurality of land types in rural areas in this
context, including forestlands as well as residential lands. Meanwhile, urban and peri-urban lands are included in this phenomenon, as we can observe not only in mega-cities
in the south, but also in key BRICS countries where corporate lad accumulation occurs in
and around key cities, as in China, India (especially for its Special Economic Zones), andRussia (especially the more recent spread of ‘dachas’). In North Atlantic countries, land
issue is also very much of urban and peri-urban issue. This can be seen in places where
there are ongoing conflicts between urban dwellers who wanted to put to use empty urban
lands versus corporate and state interests over these prime real estate. We see this fromDetroit to Vienna. We see this in vast places where there are struggles between corporate
giants and governments and the one hand and local communities on the other over
questions of gas pipelines as in the case of Canada, or over hydraulic fracturing orfracking) as in the case of the eastern United States. These land issues necessarily
brought a different set of working people now confronted by some kind of a land
question. The struggle for land today therefore cannot be, and should not be, reduced toagricultural land struggle by farmers. Key is to broaden the land question to encompass
the fantastic diversity of land issues and land struggles by a great mixture of people.
Class and identify politics play an equally key role in these land politics. Only a broadand flexible framework can capture this changing context. And our proposition is that
‘land sovereignty’, however awkward it is, can offer a preliminary framework for a
different kind of conversation around a new way of looking at land questions.
Unlike the limited scope of the several variants of land reform, land sovereignty
simultaneously addresses all the broad and key land-based social dynamics of
redistribution, distribution, non-redistribution and (re)concentration. Land sovereigntyincludes the conventional land reform—but goes far beyond it. The concept of land
sovereignty also addresses the two broad fronts of contemporary land struggles: struggles
against land dispossession and displacement, as well as struggles for land (re)possession,which we will discuss in the next section.
Land sovereignty as a political project
The notion of land sovereignty re-politicizes and historically grounds the popular
mainstream conception of land governance, by bringing in social relations as the key unit
of analysis, and object of policy and political advocacy, rather than ‘things’ like papersand titles. Land sovereignty can thus be used to also contribute to the construction of a
counter-narrative in reaction to the aggressive neoliberal ‘land governance’ perspective—
which is a technical, administrative approach to land.
11
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
12/22
It is important to note however that the notion of land sovereignty as a political project is
inherently a cross-class project involving different strata of the working classes andgroups, both rural and urban, agriculture-related and not, within and across national
borders – as explained above. It necessarily involves peasants, small and medium family
farmers, landless rural labourers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, fishers, urban dwellers,community residents, forest dwellers, agriculturalists, environmentalists, food justice
activists, among others. It is therefore a very broad struggle front – which makes it a
more inclusive, encompassing and promising proposition. In this way, it is similar to food
sovereignty as a political project where we can see Indonesian forest dweller, urbangardener from Detroit, Venezuelan campesino, environmentalist in France, Zimbabwean
small farmer, pastoralist in Iran, a community resident in a fracking site in South Africa,
anti-SEZ activist in India, sugarcane cutter in Brazil – linking arms with a commonstruggle for land, forging a common global struggle front.
While the broadness of the land sovereignty political project is the source of great
potential and promise, it is also its key source of potential weakness. Bringing everyonewith some kind of a land question together also means that the political project
internalizes not only the pre-existing synergies among these different groups – but also
tensions. In many cases, a land sovereignty political project will have to engage withother well-off classes in the countryside: rich farmers, traders, and moneylenders.
Tactical and strategic alliances in and around a land sovereignty project are likely to
emerge and disappear. re-emerge and reappear. However, a workable political project,like land sovereignty, is one that confronts, and does not back away from political
tensions, while exploring potential synergies among diverse groups within a cross-class
coalition.
Land sovereignty represents two dimensions of contemporary people’s struggles for land:
as a people’s counter-enclosure campaign, land sovereignty represents struggles againstdispossession; as a people’s enclosure campaign, land sovereignty represents struggles
for (re)possession of land property. A land sovereignty movement is therefore necessarily
a ‘people’s’ (counter)enclosure movement. We offer preliminary discussion below.
Land sovereignty as people’s counter-enclosure campaign
A people’s counter-enclosure campaign is one where the rural poor resist political processes that maintain inequitable status quo in land ownership and control, as well as
struggle against trends towards land (re)concentration. In the specific current
international context, it is a campaign where people struggle to resist (trans)national landgrabbers. There are two types of land policy institutional contexts within which a
people’s counter-enclosure campaign could be launched, or should be launched, namely,
non-(re)distribution and (re)concentration (Borras and Franco 2010c).
The defining character of the non-(re)distribution land policy category is the maintenance
of the status quo, where the latter is a condition that is marked by land-based inequity and
exclusion, such as the existence of latifundia in Latin America, or state monopoly in land
12
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
13/22
as in Indonesia. Here, the most typical land policy is ‘no land policy’. Having no land
policy is effectively the policy framework at play. In settings where there are vast land-
based inequities and exclusion, a ‘no land policy, policy’ effectively advocates for non-redistribution of land-based wealth and power. In other settings, a similar effect is created
by having a land policy, even a redistributive land reform policy, but then keeping this
dormant. An example of this is the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 in Indonesia that existed beyond the 1960s, but was never really actively implemented until the late 1990s regime
transition. The existence of this type of land policy favours and facilitates (trans)national
land grabbing.
However, there are also active land policies that are categorically non-(re)distributive.Formalization of inequality occurs in agrarian societies marked by socio-economic
inequality and lopsided power relations between various groups and classes in society,where a technical ‘formalization’ of land rights campaign is carried out. Formalizing land
rights of legal claimants in settings marked by high degree of inequality is likely to
formalize land claims by the non-poor, mostly elite claimants, or indeed, the state. In
such cases, formalization policies have only formalized inequality and institutionalizedhistorical injustice. Many earlier private land titling programs, carried out by former
colonial powers, dispossessed the local population and facilitated land grabbing by
colonizers. Formal land rights do not guarantee protection of land rights for the rural poorin the current context of global land rights. The Land Law of 1997 in Mozambique
guarantees land rights of local communities; the same law was used by transnational
large-scale land investors to secure large chunks of lands for their investments,displacing, and even dispossessing many of the local population in the process.
Restitution without redistribution happens when large-scale land-based wealth and powertransfers are carried out in the name of the poor, who in reality have no significant
effective access to, or control over land resources that are transferred. Examples of this
include post-conflict situations where land restitutions were carried out through largechunks of land being awarded to communities or the state, without any process of
democratizing access to and control over these land resource. Many civil wars were
partly caused by struggles to control land resources or territories. Therefore, many peace
settlements have included land policies. However, seldom do redistributive reforms inland figure in peace settlements, partly because on many occasions forces opposed to any
redistributive perspective in land policies are located in the warring factions. In cases
where democratization of land was attempted in the peace settlement process, the kindsof land policies adopted were too market-friendly, as in Central America in the mid-
1990s, and the 1980 Zimbabwe peace settlement. As a result, policies benefited the elite
and the central state more than the rural poor.
Finally, there is also a trajectory that can be termed as counter-reform. The conventional
use of resettling potential and actual land claimants to empty public lands may have some
potential for redistribution, although historically it has impacted negatively on affected pre-existing settlements of local populations (Scott 1998: 69). However, where such a
resettlement policy is done precisely to avoid and undermine political agitation for
redistributive reforms in the larger agrarian society it constitutes a counter-reform. It is in
13
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
14/22
this context that the arguments put forward by land reform scholars are important to
recall. Feder (1970) once called the policy of land reform in public lands ‘counter-
reform’. Today, a good example of this is the agrarian reform resettlement program in theAmazon frontier of Brazil. João Pedro Stedile (2007, 203–4), leader of the Movement of
the Landless Workers or MST, explains that in recent years under the Lula administration
the government settled 380,000 families, but 64 per cent of these families were sent to theAmazon, which avoided any expropriation of private land owners: “The families are now
completely out of the class struggle . . . Our people are stranded in the Amazon, lost in a
hostile environment. Not even a small market for their produce is available there.”
The defining character of (re)concentration is that while land-based wealth and power
transfers do occur, access to and control over the land resource actually gets
(re)concentrated in the hands of the economically and politically dominant social classesand groups: landed classes, capitalists, corporate entities, state or other dominant
community groups such as village chiefs. This kind of change can occur in private or
public lands. The organization of control over land resources can be through individual,
corporate, state, or community group institutional arrangements in property rights. Thetransfer may involve full land ownership or not. Different variations are possible, but the
bottom line is the same: the recipients of land-based wealth and power transfers are the
economically and politically dominant social classes and groups, as well as state officialsand bureaucrats.
There are at least three broad trajectories within the (re)concentration category. Reverseredistribution is where redistributed land-based wealth and power (from the landed
classes or the state to the working poor) was later redistributed back to the landed classes,
other elites or the state. This can occur in a large scale, such as those in Chile afterAllende, or in a ‘micro’ level involving specific landholdings that were previously
redistributed to peasants. In the current context of global land grabbing, an example is the
30,000 hectares of Procana sugarcane plantation in the Gaza province of Mozambiquewhere the local population, beneficiaries of previous land reform, were displaced to pave
the way for the plantation. Perverse redistribution is a trajectory where land-based wealth
and power are transferred from the working poor people to the economically and
politically dominant classes and groups, as well as state officials and bureaucrats. Thiscan happen under a variety of policies, including notionally pro-poor policies such as
land reform and forest land allocation or management devolution, as well as through
formalization and privatization of land rights, a variety of land-based joint ventureagreements, and land lease arrangements, and so on. Historically, this kind of
redistribution has occurred in many guises and in many places. These include the many
private land titling initiatives past and present that were captured by dominant classes,groups, state officials, and bureaucrats, where the poor lost access to and control over
land resources, as shown in the vast critical literature on the subject. Examples of this are
plenty in the current context of global land grabbing; in Cambodia previously farmed and
occupied lands were suddenly appropriated by the state for reallocation to domestic andtransnational investors. Lopsided distribution is where land-based wealth and power are
transferred from the state or community, directly or indirectly, by policy or through the
open market, to a handful of private or state entities, with the net effect of excluding
14
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
15/22
others while benefiting a few. On many occasions, the way state lands are being
reallocated by the Indonesian state to private corporations represents a good example of
this type; it has facilitated the rapid expansion of oil palm in that country in the context ofglobal surge in biodiesel.
In conclusion, these two broad types of land policies—non-(re)distribution and(re)concentration—undermine the fundamental property and livelihood interests of the
rural poor in a variety of ways. In many cases, these policies lead to dispossession of
countless working class people, in others these lead to poor people’s adverse
incorporation into enclaves of corporate-controlled agri-food and bioenergy complexes, both in the South and North.
These policies are being opposed, in various ways and extents—by the rural, fromorganized to unorganized, overt to covert, legal to extralegal, and from local to
transnational arenas of political contestations. The working class people’s counter-
enclosure campaign is a defensive struggle. It is a critical component of land sovereignty
campaign, but represents only half of the picture of the agrarian battlefront today. Theother half is a more pro-active campaign, the people’s enclosure campaign.
Land sovereignty as people’s enclosure campaign
A people’s enclosure campaign is one where the rural poor pro-actively assert their
political control over their remaining lands against potential and actual threats of eliteenclosure. It is one that can be done either independently from the central state
(community-based people’s enclosure of the commons) or in direct engagement with the
state. Here, we will focus on the latter type. There are two types of land policyinstitutional contexts within which people’s enclosure campaign can, and should, take
place namely, redistributive and distributive land policies – both policies privilege the
working classes (Borras and Franco 2010c).
On the one hand, the defining principle for redistributive land policy is that the land-
based wealth and power are transferred from the monopoly control of either private
landed classes, or the state, to landless and near-landless working people. It changes therelative shares of social classes and groups in society. It is a ‘zero-sum’ reform process.
Here, redistributed wealth and power is a matter of degree, depending on the net loss of
the landed entities, and on the net gain of the landless and near-landless poor. The policies that expropriate lands without compensation and distribute these to beneficiaries
are redistributive reforms. Lands that are expropriated can in turn be appropriated by the
state to create state farms to benefit the landless poor by giving them employment inthese large-scale farms, as in the case of Cuba, in agricultural context. Redistributive
reforms also take form as land policies that acquire land usually at slightly below the
commercial market value, and then re-sell the same land to peasants at slightly below the
full market value of the land. Arguably, the former is more redistributive than the latter,as illustrated empirically in the cases of Chinese and Taiwanese processes of the early
1950s, respectively.
15
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
16/22
The conventional notion of redistributive land reform, applied only in large private farm
lands, is the most commonly understood example of land-based redistributive reform.
These are explained in important works such as Tuma (1965) and Griffin et al (2002).However, in this paper we argue that there are a variety of policy expressions, beyond the
conventional notion, that can result in changing the relative shares of the social classes
and groups in society. These include redistributive land reform, land restitution, sharetenancy or land tenure reform, land stewardship, indigenous land rights recognition, and
labour reform. This is regardless of whether a policy is applied to a private or public land.
The key is to be able to establish the degree of redistributed wealth and power, and to
which direction.
Redistributive land policies can also occur in non-agricultural context, as when state-
directed housing land policies, both rural and urban, or for urban gardening, or forforestry and indigenous people’s land claims. This latter set of redistributive land policy
issues is under-explored, and deserves more extensive empirical research. In the context
of the revalorization of land globally, it becomes necessary to extend the notion of
redistributive land policies way beyond the conventional idea of farmland redistributivereform – to include non-agricultural land issues. It is profoundly important to think of
redistributive land policy, for instance, in the context of Detroit urban land, or rural non-
agricultural land issue such as landless rural labourer’s housing lot issues amongsugarcane cutters in Central Philippines.
On the other hand, the basic defining character of the distributive land policy reform isthat the landless and near-landless working poor are the recipients of land-based wealth
and power transferred to them. However, the original source of wealth and power can
either be the state or community, or a private entity that has been fully compensated bythe state. In many settings, this type of reform would mean affirming and protecting pre-
existing land access and occupancy by poor peasants, whose tenure is insecure, as in
many countries in Africa (Cousins 2007). It is a ‘positive sum’ reform process. It doesnot take resources from one social class or group in society to redistribute to another. In
fact, often such a policy is passed precisely to avoid having to resort to redistributive
policies (Fox 1993: 10). For example, a piece of land that is officially categorized as
public or state forest is actually an agroforest land tended and tilled by poor peasants orforest dwellers. A long-term forestland use rights allocation was issued to the poor
peasants and forest dwellers in order to make their pre-existing access to the forest land
more formal and secure. This is a distributive reform.
Meanwhile, a government may purchase at market price a piece of private land and then
distribute this to the landless for free or for a minimal cost. This type of transaction can,under certain conditions, qualify as distributive reform. The post-apartheid South African
land reform is, arguably, an example because the beneficiaries received a cash transfer
from the government in order to purchase land (Lahiff 2007). Some past and present
public land resettlement programs, in theory and under certain conditions, may qualify inthis category.
16
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
17/22
Similar to the discussion under the redistributive type of reform, the landed property
rights that are distributed can be private, state, or community-owned. Distributed landed
property rights organizations can be individual, group or cooperative. This distributivetype of reform, in general, is perhaps not as controversial or conflictual as the
redistributive type. This is because the key question here is more ‘who gets what’ and
avoids taking lands from the landed classes (Fox 1993: 10). However, it would be amistake to assume that all reforms involving such lands are conflict-free. This is certainly
not the case. Especially where there is a perception by some elites that such distributive
reforms may actually erode some of their economic privileges, prestige, and
opportunities, whether losses are real or perceived. As in redistributive types, distributiveland reform can be found in a variety of policies, including the conventional land reform,
forest devolution, public land resettlement, and so on.
Here again, it is critical to adjust our unit of analysis and empirical inquiry to go beyond
rural farmlands, to include rural non-agricultural and urban and peri-urban lands. This
may even be the more important and contentious type of reform because as discussed
earlier in this paper, the chief target of current global enclosures are lands that arestate/public lands. This set of issues is way under-developed, and needs further empirial
research and conceptualization.
Stepping back, and looking at the big picture, we suggest that people’s enclosure
campaign through redistributive and distributive land policies can be carried out through
at least three broad strategies, namely, state-centric, social movement or community-led,and state/community-driven. It is not about the mere presence of absence of either state
or community entity that defines these types of strategies, but it is the character and the
extent to which each actor plays a key role that is important.
State-centric. Historically, the most sweeping (re)distributive land reforms were state-
driven (Barraclough, 2001). Examples include China from 1949, Taiwan in the 1950s,Japan and South Korea after World War II and Vietnam in the 1950s and after 1975.
There is emerging evidence showing that the A1 land reform model (small family farms)
of the Zimbabwe fast-track land reform shows some relative success.
As the examples show, successful and significant land reforms were carried out by the
central state not only in the context of socialist transitions, but also in non-socialist
contexts. The central state has played a key and leading role in these sweeping social justice redistributive land reforms. It does not mean to say that other non-state actors
were absent or did not play any significant role. They did; but, the role of the central state
was the key.
State-centric (re)distributive land policies occurred not only in the form of conventional
land reforms, but also in other redistributive land policies, such as forest land
(re)allocation as in contemporary Vietnam, albeit successful cases are limited. A varietyof land restitution experiences were also carried out through time, as in the case of
contemporary east Timor and South Africa, but again with limited success.
17
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
18/22
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
19/22
politically profound as the more dramatic national cases. Contemporary examples include
land occupation initiatives in Indonesia where peasants have mobilized around the Basic
Agrarian Law of 1960 to seize and occupy lands in different parts of the country, theChiapas struggle for land in Mexico, and the ‘village land banks’ initiative by peasants
and indigenous communities in northeast Thailand.
The social movement/community-led redistributive land policies are one of the three
broad types of redistributive alternatives. However, it is this category that tends to receive
so much attention from the broad community of academics and activists, perhaps largely
because of its more dramatic forms of actions – although within this broad category, it isreally the national social movement-led sub-type that tends to corner bulk of the public
attention. Here, we remind our reader that the latter is just one of the many redistributive
alternatives, and also the rarest, and most difficult to replicate in the current politicaleconomic context.
The examples in the discussion above and the general framing of the discussion remain
limited to the conventional notion of farmland political processes. In the context of thediscussion in this paper and in our proposition, it will be quite important to start thinking
of the ideas discussed on this subsection in the context of people’s land struggles beyond
agricultural farmlands to include land struggles around rural non-agricultural, urban and peri-urban. There is no shortage of exciting empirical cases here, from Detroit to
Shanghai, from Berkeley to Vienna, from Sao Paulo to Jambi.
State/community-driven. The least popular and least understood type of redistributive
alternatives is the state/community- or state/social movement-driven redistributive land
policies. The more popular ones have been those with dramatic forms of actions: either avery top down, dramatic state action to carry out sweeping land reform, or a dramatic
action from below by highly organized social movements to implement the state land
law. There are important lessons and experiences in the past, and at present that showhow and when a state/community or state/social movement-driven process resulted in
desirable pro-poor outcomes. This category is somewhat a combination of the first two
types described above: both state and non-state actors have played more or less equally
significant roles in a symbiotic way. There are two sub-types: state/community andstate/social movement-driven; the difference between the two is similar to the earlier
discussion on community and movement-led land policies.
When mobilizations from below are met by actions from above, even less radical state
land reform laws can be carried out to a relatively significant extent. This was what
happened in the Philippines during the limited period from 1993 to 2000, more or lesswhat transpired during the Sandinista land reform in the 1980s, during the Allende
reforms in the early 1970s in Chile, as well as in Kerala in the 19760s-1970s. This was
the same process in West Bengal’s share tenancy reform in the 1970s and onward. There
are also several cases of successful subnational, localized state/community-drivencommunity forest land reallocation and management, community mapping, and land
restitution in various parts of the world.
19
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
20/22
The state/community and state/social movement-driven category is an important
redistributive alternative, especially in places where the state on its own in unable to
overcome structural and institutional obstacles to reform, or in settings where powerfulnational social movements do not exist. Combining the limited forces of state and societal
actors become central to any redistributive alternative.
Again, the discussion above limited to conventional farmland reform context. It will be
important to extend the discussion of the concepts discussed here to include land
struggles beyond rural agricultural lands, as argued earlier.
Concluding remarks
Our main intention in this essay is to help raise preliminary critical questions about thestrengths and limitations of current analytical and political frameworks employed by
engaged academics, progressive researchers, and radical social movement activists in
order to better understand and mobilize effectively around land issues within the current
global context, where land-grabbing and food crisis have become important features. Wedo not offer any firm answers to some of the questions, but we put forward some
propositions for critical discussion on how to go about with some concrete alternatives in
the global land front.
In this essay, we offer an initial and rough discussion about the concept of land
sovereignty: why we need to transition the people’s demand for land from ‘land tenuresecurity’ to land sovereignty. We have explained that in our concept, land sovereignty is
anchored on two inseparable types of sovereignty: state and people. We also explain why
and how land sovereignty is both an alternative analytical framework that can help usunderstand better the complexity of land issues in the current context, as well as an
alternative political platform that can help us confront more effectively the challenges
confronting the global land and agrarian fronts today. Land sovereignty as a campaignrepresents the defensive struggle of the rural poor—people’s counter-enclosure
campaign, and the pro-active struggle—people’s enclosure campaign. The two are
intertwined.
Finally, the discussion above tells us that the components of land sovereignty being
proposed here are actually existing realities, and not newly invented abstract concepts..
Some of these concrete alternatives are dramatic expressions of struggles that havecaptured the imagination, and inspired vast numbers of people worldwide. Others are
equally politically profound, but tend not to get any romantic reaction from people
outside the concerned communities. What land sovereignty is trying to do, is tocontribute to clarifying the basic principles of what a truly pro-poor land policy is, and
provide a broad and flexible framework that can collectively bring such policies,
programs, actions, and endeavours into a singular, common alternative framework.
References (incomplete)
20
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
21/22
Baletti, Brenda, Tamara Johnson and Wendy Wolford, 2008.‘Late Mobilization:
TransnationalPeasant Networks and Grassroots Organizing in Brazil and South Africa’.
Journal of Agrarian Change, 8 (2/3): 290–314.
Barraclough, Solon (2001) ‘The Role of the State and Other Actors in Land Reform’, in
K. Ghimire (ed.) Land Reform and Peasant Livelihoods: The Social Dynamics of RuralPoverty and Agrarian Reform in Developing Countries, pp. 26–64. Geneva: URISD;
London: ITDG.
Bernstein, Henry (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Halifax: Fernwood; MA:Kumarian.
Borras, Saturnino Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco (2010a). ‘From threat to opportunity?:Problems with the idea of a ‘code of conduct’ for land grabbing’. Yale Humans Rights
and Development Law Journal, vol. 13, no. 1.
Borras, Saturnino Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco (2010b). Towards a Broader View of thePolitics of Global Land Grab: Rethinking Land Issues, Reframing Resistance. ICAS
Working Paper Series 001, co-published by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) and
the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam.
Borras, Saturnino Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco (2010c). ‘Contemporary Discourses in and
Contestations around Pro-Poor Land Policies and Land Governance. Journal of AgrarianChange 10(1).
Cotula, Lorenzo, Sonja Vermeulen, Rebecca Leonard, and James Keeley (2009). ‘LandGrab or Development Opportunity? : Agricultural Investments and International Land
Deals in Africa. London: IIED.
Cousins, Ben, 2007. ‘More than socially embedded: the distinctive character of
“communal tenure” regimes in South Africa and its implications for land policy’. Journal
of Agrarian Change, 7(3): 281-423.
Feder, Ernest (1970) ‘Counterreform’, in R. Stavenhagen (ed.) Agrarian Problems and
Peasant Movements in Latin America, pp. 173–224. New York: Anchor Books.
Fox, Jonathan, 2007. Accountability Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fox, Jonathan (1993) The Politics of Food in Mexico: State Power and SocialMobilization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
GRAIN (2008). ‘Seized: The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security’.
Barcelona: GRAIN.
Griffin, Keith, Azizur Rahman Khan and Amy Ickowitz (2002) ‘Poverty and Distribution
of Land’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2(3): 279–330.
21
8/9/2019 Borras Et Al 2014
22/22
IFPRI (2009). ‘Food scare sparks Third World land rush’, as reported by Reuters,
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE53S97420090429?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true
Lahiff, Edward (2007). ‘Willing buyer, willing seller’: South Africa’s failed experimentin market-led agrarian reform. Third World Quarterly, 28(8): 1577 – 1597.
McMichael, Philip (2009). ‘A Food Regime Genealogy’. Journal of Peasant Studies,
36(1): 171-196.
Martinez-Torres, Maria Elena and Peter Rosset (2010). ‘La Vía Campesina: the birth and
evolution of a transnational social movement’. Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(1).
Ribot, Jesse and Nancy Peluso (2003). ‘A Theory of Access’. Rural Sociology, 68(2):
153-181.
Scott, James (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stedile, João Pedro, 2007. ‘The Class Struggles in Brazil: The Perspective of the MST’.
In Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism. Socialist Register
2008, eds L. Panitch and C. Leys, 193–216. London: Merlin Press.
Tuma, Elias (1965) Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform: A Comparative Analysis.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tsing, Anna. 2002. ‘Land as Law: Negotiating the Meaning of Property in Indonesia’. In
Land, Property, and the Environment, ed. F. Richards, 94-137. Oakland: Institute forContemporary Studies.
Via Campesina (2008). ‘Food Sovereignty for Africa: A Challenge at Fingertips’.
Maputo: Via Campesina
Top Related