Poverty and the Distribution of Land

Land reform is a many-splendoured thing. The term has been used to include not only redistributive reforms of ownership rights but also the establishment of collective or communal forms of farming, state sponsored land colonization schemes in frontier areas, and land tenure reforms, i.e., changes in the contractual arrangements between the landowner and those who cultivate the land. In addition, tax (and credit) measures intended to create incentives for large landowners to sell part of their holding sometimes are described as “market friendly” land reforms. These include penal tax rates on uncultivated or underutilized land, progressive land taxes with rates that rise sharply with the size of holding, and self-assessed land tax schemes under which the state may purchase the land at the self-assessed value if it believes the landowner has undervalued his land. In this paper the term land reform will be restricted to programmes which redistribute land ownership from large private landowners to small peasant farmers and landless agricultural workers