Failure to address skewed land ownership in the developing world.

Ali, Syed Mohammad

CONTESTATIONS AROUND LAND: THE BIGGER PICTURE

Given that the agrarian sector remains predominant in the developing world, providing not only a significant portion of national incomes but also absorbing the bulk of its labour, the issue of access to land for cultivation purposes is a major economic issue with clear livelihood implications. But there are also several other correlated factors contributing to the reason access to land is considered important, ranging from food security to environmental concerns, since people who have a piece of their own land are not only better equipped to meet their household nutritional needs, but are also likely to utilise more sustainable agricultural practices if they have ownership of the land they cultivate. (1)

Moreover, often landless people in rural areas also do not own the land on which their homestead is located, which further increases their vulnerability to exploitation. Nonetheless, inequality in land ownership, in which a small minority owns vast tracts of land and many others own very little or no land, remains a predominant feature across the developing world, and it is in turn blamed for widespread poverty, marginalisation and disempowerment. (2) Simultaneously, it is feared that the phenomenon of globalisation is increasing the number of displaced farmers, as more land is now being used for the large-scale, commercial, export-led production of cash crops. In order to survive, poor farmers often feel compelled to encroach on forest land and other fragile environmental areas where the climate and soil do not permit sustainable agriculture.

Despite these compulsions, altering land tenure arrangements to provide poor people in rural areas of the developing world greater access to land is a complex and politically difficult proposition. (3) This is so because it is not uncommon to find a convergence of elite interests (feudal, political and sometimes even military) with regards to land use within developing countries; such is the case for example in Pakistan. (4)

It is therefore not surprising that land reforms is such a politically charged topic that even international development agencies are reluctant to tackle head-on, instead often resigning themselves to evoking global calls to national governments to help their rural masses gain access to land. Prominent events that have drawn attention to the issue of land reforms in this manner include the 1979 World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, the 1992 Earth Summit, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, and most recently the 2006 International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development. (5)

In principle, at least, the rights-based approaches to development consider land redistribution a basic prerequisite for inclusive, broad-based development. Access to land is legitimately considered a basic human right, as it involves the right to feed oneself, the right to adequate shelter and the right to employment. There are also economic reasons for land reforms, as land monopolies act as an impediment to productivity-enhancing investments. Redistribution of land can promote equity as well, which makes land reforms important for promoting social justice.

But the high costs attached to land redistribution are also evident; the violence unleashed by agrarian revolts in communist-inspired contexts, as in China, provides ample evidence to this effect. Moreover, once the communist party took control of China, it firmly brushed aside any aspirations of individual cultivation in favour of collective farming. Collective farming was however abandoned in China, as it has been in other former communist countries, due to its inability to provide sufficient incentive for agricultural production. Various forms of privatisation are instead being experimented with, including handing back collectivised farms to their original owners, or cultivators, or else making cultivators shareholders in the state-owned farms. (6)

Other examples of state-led land reforms having gone astray can be found in contemporary Africa, which the subsequent section will draw further attention to. Nonetheless, it should now be evident that many developing countries have at least tried to implement different types of land reforms. Radical attempts have aimed to confer ownership not only to the state, but also directly to poor farmers by implementing ceilings (and floors) on land holdings and appropriating surplus land for redistribution among the landless. More moderate attempts have also been initiated for the express purposes of abolishing intermediaries or providing security of tenure to sharecroppers. (7)

The success in terms of implementing these different types of land reforms varies significantly from country to country, and also indicates the need for land reforms to be accompanied by other supplemental measures to support poor famers in becoming more productive. The subsequent sections will take cognisance of land reform experiences from around the developing world, including in particular South Asia. The role of the World Bank, an influential external development stakeholder, will also be highlighted in the process of trying to address skewed land distribution through the creation of land markets, for instance, prior to a reassessment of existing realities towards the conclusion of this paper.

SUCCESS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA VERSUS SOUTH AMERICAN AND AFRICAN FAILURES

Redistributive land reforms are acknowledged to have played an important role in the rapid growth of South-East Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia after World War II. (8) Yet the experience of land reforms in other parts of Asia, and in most parts of Africa and South America, has been less optimistic.

The uniqueness of national socioeconomic and political circumstances cannot be ignored while discussing issues of land access and redistribution imperatives. However, international experiences in implementing land reforms do indicate the emergence of some common themes which can be discussed at a broader level. For instance, in the case of Latin American reforms generally (though to different degrees) land reforms were impelled by populist demands for redistribution. While land access to the landless was thus secured, these redistribution attempts largely neglected supplemental policies required for land redistribution to be economically productive. For instance, important characteristics accompanying the South-East Asian land reforms (in South Korea and Taiwan), such as family ownership, market-based compensation for landowners and provision of secure land titles for the redistributed lands, were absent in South America. (9) Moreover, the establishment of responsive and transparent government institutions was an equally important aspect of land reform in the South-East Asian context, which remained largely missing in South America.

Thus, in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, large-scale land reforms did not have the desired productivity impact. While agricultural production and standards of living initially increased among peasant beneficiaries when land reforms occurred in the 1950s in countries like Bolivia, the lack of a rural credit market and ineffective agricultural extension services, followed by inflation, eventually eroded any gains. (10) The same problems have been encountered more recently in Brazil. Due to a lack of supplemental measures to help empower the rural poor, many large landowners responded to the threat of land reform with large-scale evictions long before governments were able to effectively implement laws aimed at tenant protection or land reform. (11)

Still, all hope for land reform is not lost. There is an ongoing reconsideration of land reform despite failed attempts in countries like Bolivia. The renewed emphasis on land reform was instigated by a populist resurgence that has put redistributive policies such as land reform back on political agendas throughout the region. But the new leadership in South America must now learn from the South-East Asian experience, as well as from its own past failures, and realise that often it is not the actual distribution that matters most, but rather that the distribution be accompanied by other reforms such as provision of agricultural extension services. Otherwise poor farmers are not able to become productive and to cultivate the land allocated to them on a sustainable basis.

While there is a conceptual consensus that land reforms contribute to equity and growth, (12) the experience on the ground also indicates that while they may alter sociopolitical hierarchies, they do not necessarily dismantle them. In a number of African countries which have experimented with land reforms over the past three decades, control of land has been retained by existing powerful social groups, whereas marginalised rural segments such as women and the landless poor have been largely ignored. The Zimbabwean evidence confirms this finding, as does the South African experience.

Zimbabwe's colonial legalisation of white farmer settlements had resulted in racially skewed land distribution, and a dispossessed black rural population confined to degraded and overcrowded communal lands. The main justification for land reform in Zimbabwe has been the repossession and redistribution of freehold land to achieve a more equitable balance in land ownership, as well as to raise the economic and social well-being of the African population, in order to redress past wrongs and to address the consequences of colonial land practices. Although the Zimbabwean government has been keen to encourage the emergence of a black rural middle-class, radical land confiscation and redistribution have lacked the required strategic depth, have been haphazard at best, and have met with limited success. (13) The consequences for the poorest rural people in this context has been rather negative because the fast track land reform program caused large numbers of farm workers to be fired; yet farm workers have not been among the groups targeted to benefit from land reallocations. Moreover, women, whose rights to land under customary law were weak, have also failed to benefit proportionately from the fast track process. (14) The data shows that well over eighty-five per cent of beneficiaries were men, despite the prevalence in rural Zimbabwe of several million poor households that do not include an adult male. (15)

In South Africa's case, the land redistribution policies have been strongly influenced by the advice of the World Bank. The World Bank tried to stimulate the creation of agrarian policies, adjusted to the neo-liberal parameters by encouraging leasing, privatisation of state farms and an increased focus on facilitating land transactions in the case of South Africa as well as some South American countries including Brazil, Guatemala and Colombia during the early 1990s. In South Africa, the World Bank recommended an injection of state-subsidised purchasing power to allow some black South Africans to purchase land in the existing land market. However, no well-defined or coherent measures to focus on women or the rural poor were proposed and thus critics predicted that the World Bank's approach would eventually result in a package of state subsidies to a class of black male rural capitalists. (16) In fact, the South African government's populist pronouncements on land reform resulted in a surge of waged labour shedding, motivated by employers' fears of loss of control over land, creating massive unemployment amongst poor landless agricultural labourers. Evidence also indicates that the beneficiaries of land redistribution lived in relatively wealthy rural households, while over ninety-six per cent of poor households did not benefit from the land reform program at all. (17) Thus, as in other countries where this sort of a non-redistributive approach was tried, it too failed to solve the problem of land access and poverty alleviation.

Both the African and the South American land reform experiences indicate that attempts to redress gross imbalances in land ownership and access through the radical sweep of the pen is not enough. Recreating sustainable livelihoods on the land is a significantly more difficult task. Moreover, evident misfits between land policy and rural development emerge, where land reforms are pursued by a government primarily as the means of redressing past injustices rather than as a basis for creating sustainable rural livelihoods.

The South Asian experience will now be focused upon, first to demonstrate how implementing land reforms can be a much more difficult proposition when vested interests continue to subvert attempts to alter skewed land ownership patterns, and thereafter to show how donor initiatives, like those of the World Bank, also fail in providing any other forms of meaningful opportunities to the landless and marginalised poor.

THE SOUTH ASIAN EXPERIENCE

In every South Asian country, the largest category of rural poor consists of landless, marginal farmers and tenants who cultivate land mostly on a sharecropping basis. (18) However, since the elite in South Asian societies always capture national resources, including land, any serious attempt to tackle poverty that implies comprehensive structural changes in land use and ownership is bound to face stiff resistance--consider the case of Pakistan, in which half of all rural households do not own any land, and the top five per cent own over a third of all cultivated areas. (19) Despite similar historical contexts surrounding the implementation of land reform programs in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, the governments of these countries have adopted different approaches to tackling rural poverty through land reforms, with mixed results.

Following independence from colonial rule, the newly formed states of South Asia inherited non-productive governing elites focused primarily on the maintenance of law and order and the preservation (largely through patronage and bribes) of strategic alliances between state bureaucrats and military officials, large landowners and powerful members of an emerging industrial bourgeoisie. (20) The doling out of land tenancies for services by the holders of imperial land had historically been consolidated by Mughal emperors through the employment of imperial administrators called zamindari to ensure the efficient collection of taxes from the peasants. (21) As the lords of their domains, the zamindari performed police, judicial and/or military duties and held regular courts called zamindari adalat, where they extracted fines, presents and perquisites. (22)

Under British rule, the system of zamindari was preserved by the Raj, which accepted the authority of the local rulers of the 'princely states' as long as they demonstrated adequate loyalty to the Empire. The zamindars under the British (a class of landed gentry, some of whom were descended from royalty and who sometimes referred to themselves as rajas or 'little kings') would collect taxes, keep a small portion and transfer the bulk of the collections to the British authorities. Proprietary rights over land granted to cultivators by the Mughals were further eroded when the British transferred land rights to the favoured zamindars, who further subleased their tracts of land rather than investing in their holdings. (23)

Although the zamindari system was abolished by law by most South Asian governments following independence from the British in 1947, the system often persists in practice, in present-day Pakistan for instance. (24) This is so because despite repeated laws created to place ceilings on land holdings, many large landlords succeeded in avoiding confiscation of their lands in Pakistan. They did so by exploiting lacunas in reform legislations which had prescribed land holding limits for individuals rather than families, and many large landlords thus simply transferred ownership of individually owned large estates to their own family members. (25) Soon thereafter, with the advent of the capital-intensive Green Revolution technology and mechanised farming, focus shifted away from the need to redistribute lands, and in many instances reversed gains made by earlier redistributive efforts.

Even though technology was proclaimed as being scale-neutral, just the fact that it was costly made the distribution of gains from the technology uneven, with the rich and prosperous farmers emerging even richer owing to their ability to adopt it. Technology could have benefited the poor farmers if land reforms, and subsequently land consolidation, was completed before the introduction of the technology and farming cooperatives had been formed to collectively invest in securing technological implements. In the absence of such support the small landowners simply found it uneconomical to cultivate the land, and often sold their plots back to the richer farmers, and thus many small landowners joined the stream of landless labourers, ensuring a steady supply of cheap agricultural labour to work on the lands of richer farmers. (26)

Throughout much of South Asia today, the lives of the poor continue to be dominated by ruling clans whose powers are often derived from inherited, exclusive rights to natural resources and alliances with political and military elites. Deprived of the power to compete with better-organised and more politically influential market forces, the poor have severely limited access to sources of income, credit and technology. Their relative lack of market information, business and negotiating experience, and collective organisation further hinders opportunities for advancement, while relatively underdeveloped social and physical infrastructure increases their vulnerability to famine and disease, especially in mountainous and remote areas. In addition to having larger families with higher dependency ratios, lower educational attainment and higher underemployment levels, poor households in rural areas of South Asia also typically lack basic amenities such as a piped water supply, sanitation and electricity. (27) Perhaps unsurprisingly given this context, many policy interventions undertaken in South Asia aimed at promoting agricultural development have failed to break the lingering marginalisation of the poor.

In Pakistan, there is a convergence of elite interests, and power (as mentioned above) continues to prevent any significant land redistribution from taking place at all. Correspondingly, some examples of land reform can be found in India that are conspicuously absent in Pakistan. One such example is the legalisation of tribal land settlements in the hill areas of Orissa--a state-led initiative that has not only resulted in increasing the sense of ownership in the region, but also in a notable improvement to local natural resource management. (28) The much-studied 1970s land reforms of Kerala and West Bengal, which abolished the landlord and tenant classes by banning tenancy in paddy fields and household plots, had various impacts but are widely acknowledged to have reduced inequalities in land ownership, caste and income. (29)

More typically, however, the governments of both India and Pakistan have directed their efforts away from the politically charged issue of land reforms and concentrated on more manageable and palatable rural issues, such as the cultivation and irrigation of usable land. Nevertheless, the 'public good' nature of a natural resource like land, provided that it is effectively owned, managed and cultivated, and its potential for increasing agricultural productivity and reducing rural poverty, cannot be overemphasised. (30)

The need to address problems of land ownership and management is becoming all the more urgent as poor farmers in developing countries struggle to compete with heavily subsidised agricultural products from developed countries that are increasingly dominating both domestic and global markets. Another similar pressure is the increasing prevalence of genetically engineered high-yield seed varieties produced by transnational agribusiness corporations, which is seen to be undermining the use and preservation of indigenous seeds traditionally used by local farmers, and in turn their food security.31 These issues are exacerbated by the liberalisation policies pursued by international financial institutions like the World Bank, whose particular role in tackling the problem of landlessness merits special attention.

WORLD BANK PERSPECTIVES ON LAND REFORMS

Given its prominence in the provision of development aid to the developing world, and its subjection of this aid to the condition of pursuing prescribed reforms, the World Bank can play an instrumental role in influencing land redistribution in countries with skewed land holdings. However, the World Bank has shifted focus away from land redistribution to encouraging collective ownership to be privatised, using market mechanisms to improve land access, or else to improve tenancy rights of sharecroppers. Various combinations of these reforms are being carried out in various countries, from South Africa, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, to the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. (32)

However, critics claim that the World Bank's obsession with the establishment of land markets and market-assisted land reforms has, more often than not, nullified even the best of its intentions to redistribute land in many developing countries. In Brazil, for example, under the World Bank scheme, loans and credits would be granted to the landless to buy land at market rates from wealthy landowners and to acquire fertilisers and technical assistance for new, marketable crops. It has been pointed out that market-assisted reforms fail because they place a heavy burden on poor people to repay expensive loans, often from harvests from poor soils, as landowners often choose to sell the most marginal and ecologically fragile plots that they own. Market-assisted reforms are thus often viewed as an instrument for rewarding landlords rather than for improving the livelihoods of the landless poor. (33)

Moreover, the World Bank acknowledges that existing land tenure arrangements in South Asian countries like Pakistan are far from sufficient in order to boost their agricultural production. But to address this situation, the World Bank reiterates the need for measures like rapid access and transparency of the land records, which it presumes will give an impetus not only for investments in agricultural production, but also for facilitating the process of transactions to achieve efficient land use. The World Bank further argues that land markets will provide a chance for the smallholders to turn their fixed assets in the form of land into dynamic assets to be integrated in the market.

To strengthen the case for its arguments, the World Bank recently commissioned research to compare farming practices on rented and owned land in rural Pakistan. While this research was not unique in making this comparison, it did for the first time focus on investment behaviour, and interestingly it has found that when contracts are incomplete there is lesser investment on land due to the threat of opportunistic expropriation or capital holdups caused by the inability to transfer or sell land rapidly. Using data from households cultivating multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, the paper shows that land-specific investments are lower on leased plots, whereas greater tenure security increases land-specific investment, even on leased plots. (34) However, whether land records and transfers are adequate measures to address problems like poverty remains debatable. Creating land markets may just as easily enable more agribusinesses to enter rural markets in developing countries and take over land from small farmers, without offering many employment opportunities to the landless agricultural labourers due to use of capital-intensive means of production to maximise efficiency and profits.

If the aim of land reforms is to facilitate changes in land ownership and occupational rights, such changes may alter income distribution, social status and political power structure. But this implies that national governments have to expropriate land holdings above the ceiling and distribute these among the landless and the marginal farmers free of charge, and provide these new owners with adequate credit facilities so that they do not fall back into indebtedness through borrowing from the same people who owned the land previously. However, the model of land reforms being espoused by the World Bank is in no way going to achieve these objectives, nor is it going to mitigate the abject poverty of the landless and the marginal farmers.

ASPIRATIONS VERSUS CURRENT REALITIES

The apparent failure of past land reforms is indicative of the fact that large-scale land redistributions are often politically not feasible. South Asia, for example, features an asymmetry between small and large farmers in the political as well as the economic sphere. It is access to political power that has been identified as a distorting factor that upsets the functioning of land and water markets in South Asia. (35) Land markets thus obviously cannot be studied in isolation from political considerations. These evident distorting effects are not only reflected in terms of infrastructure provision, but also in the context of access to inputs, subsidies and support services. The interaction here is complicated, because land is a source of political power, and political power provides the means to enhance the return from land, as well as to block attempts to reform the land market.36 Given this sort of a nexus it is not surprising that advantages that large farms enjoyed in the pre-reform agriculture sector can persist and translate into more pronounced land concentration in the post-reform era. Such policy distortions and market imperfections can create a bias towards large farms, allowing them to persist as such despite their inefficiency. Price policy and farm subsidies can also favour larger farmers. Moreover, large inefficient farms persist because their owners have little interest in profit maximisation. Land is instead held for political power or prestige, as the cases of countries like Pakistan demonstrate, where landlords are able to secure the votes of those households who are dependent on them due to land tenure links, and use these votes either to gain political power directly, or else to propel their proponents to the legislatures.

Therefore, market-assisted reform cannot function without deliberate policy interventions in favour of land purchases by the poorest households. Such intervention is justified not only on equity grounds, but also by the evidence that small farms are more efficient than large ones. Thus it is necessary to remove all policies that favour large farms (such as credit programs that require land as a deposit, inappropriate taxation and subsidy, and marketing policies favouring large farms) and to establish credit and rural construction programs targeted specifically at the small farms of the rural poor. (37) Besides supplemental interventions, the rural poor need legally secure entitlements to assets, and opportunities to participate in decentralised resource management, which has governance implications such as the need for devolution of power (as mentioned above).

Reconsidering existing social relations is also imperative. In order for land policy reforms to contribute more fully to poverty reduction and sustainable development, they must also be closely related to processes that empower poor men and women in decision making. After all, poverty is not only the result of a lack of economic assets but also a consequence of exclusion from political processes and access to basic services. (38) Vulnerable groups, including women, minorities and indigenous peoples are particularly prone to such marginalisation. There is growing recognition of the intra-household inequality. Specifically, women often face worse circumstances than men within the same household. (39) Despite day-to-day agricultural decisions often being made by women, they often lack formal rights to the land they manage. Women also face a number of key constraints such as lack of access to equipment and agricultural support services. Household duties or male-controlled plots may have prior claim on their labour. There is also wage discrimination against women in the market for hired labour. Land reforms cannot succeed in addressing goals like social justice unless they address gender equity concerns. Doing this is possible by ensuring that more women are provided with land titles, and by compelling line departments to ensure that women have access to inputs like seeds and fertilisers, as well as by putting in place supplemental measures to facilitate their access to agricultural markets.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Developing countries have attempted to initiate different types of land reforms with varied degrees of success. These attempts have included providing greater tenurial rights to sharecroppers, imposing a ceiling on land ownership and distributing surplus lands among the landless and poor peasants. Yet the basic structure of wealth and power in society remains more or less the same. Moreover, since these land reforms mostly tried to give land to the tiller, those not tilling land, such as landless rural labourers or those with traditionally weak land ownership status, like women, were not really helped by land reforms.

Now market-led reforms are emphasising the need for efficient fixed-rent contracts to make life easier for sharecroppers, for example by preventing their rotation by landowners who are fearful of allowing them to till a piece of land permanently and thus become a threat. However, World Bank-sponsored land transparency reforms will instead encourage corporate farming and introduce a franchise agricultural system, due to which millions of small landowners would be pushed aside, and landless labour will be subjected to even more exploitation.

Land remains the most valuable asset for the rural masses in the developing world, but mere access to it is not enough unless it is accompanied by access to other essential inputs, such as agricultural credit, fairly priced inputs, markets, training and effective extension services. Unless land reforms are simultaneously redistributive and comprehensive, production and incomes will not increase for the rural poor, nor will land access become more evenly distributed on a sustainable basis, despite lofty policy statements by postcolonial states and the rhetoric of good intentions espoused by prominent international aid agencies.

ENDNOTES

(1) Economic Commission for Africa, Land Tenure Systems and Their Impact on Food Security and Sustainable Development in Africa, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, 2004, http://www.uneca.org/eca_resources/publications/sdd/land_tenure_systems.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2010.

(2) Edward Barbier, 'Links between economic liberalization and rural resource degradation in the developing regions', Agricultural Economics, vol.23, no.2, 2000, 299-310.

(3) Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess, 'Land reform, poverty reduction, and growth: Evidence from India', The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol.115, no.2, 2000, 389-430.

(4) Syed M Ali and Brigitta Bode, Feudal lords and poverty in rural Pakistan, unpublished paper, Care International, Islamabad, 2006.

(5) Peter Rossett, 'Tides shift on agrarian reform', Backgrounder, vol. 7, no. 1. http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/58. Accessed 10 May 2010.

(6) Ray Abrahams (ed.), After Socialism: Land Reforms and Social Change in Eastern Europe, Berghahn, Providence, Rhode Island, 1996.

(7) Gazala Mansuri and Hanan Jacoby, Incomplete Contracts and Investment: A Study of Land Tenancy in Pakistan, World Bank, Washington, 2006.

(8) Ronald J Herring, 'Political conditions for agrarian reform and poverty alleviation', DFID Conference on World Development Report on Poverty, Birmingham, England, August 16-7, 1999.

(9) Klaus Deininger, 'Making negotiated land reform work: Initial experience from Colombia, Brazil and South Africa', World Development, vol.27, 1999, 651-72.

(10) Deininger, 651.

(11) Deininger, 651.

(12) The breadth of this consensus ranges from evidence presented from Africa by multilateral agencies like the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA, 2004) to a range of individual scholars drawing attention to these links from their own varied perspectives (for example, see Deininger, 651).

(13) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Rural Poverty Report 2001--The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty, 2001, http://www.ifad.org/poverty/index.htm. Accessed 10 May 2010.

(14) Human Rights Watch, 'Zimbabwe: Fast track land reform in Zimbabwe', Human Rights Watch, vol.14, no.1, 2002, 1-44.

(15) United Nations Development Programme, Zimbabwe Land Reform and Resettlement: Assessment and Suggested Framework for the Future, UNDP, New York, 2002.

(16) Tracey Simbi and Michael Aliber, Agricultural Employment Crisis in South Africa, TIPS Working Paper no. 13, Trade and Industrial Policy Secretariat, Johannesburg, 2000.

(17) John Sender and Deborah Johnston, 'Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa: Unconvincing arguments for land reform', Journal of Agrarian Change, vol.4, no.1, 2004, 142-65.

(18) Frank Place, 'Land tenure and agricultural productivity in Africa: A comparative analysis of economic theory, empirical results, and policy statements', World Development, vol. 37, no. 8, 2009, 1326-1336.

(19) Haris Gazdar, The Fourth Round, And Why They Fight On: An Essay on the History of Land and Reform in Pakistan, Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi, 2009.

(20) Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 1990.

(21) Imran Ali, 'Historical impacts on political economy in Pakistan', Asian Journal of Management Cases, vol.1, no.2, 2004, 129-46.

(22) Ali, 132.

(23) Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1978.

(24) Ali and Bode.

(25) Muhammad Arif, Livelihood Rights of Peasants and Workers, South Asia Partnership, Lahore, 2007.

(26) Ronald J Herring, 'Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and "the Eradication of Feudalism" in Pakistan', Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 21, no. 4, 1979, 519-557.

(27) Herring.

(28) Besley and Burgess, 389.

(29) Vikas Rawal, 'Agrarian reform and land markets: A study of land transactions in two villages of West Bengal, 1977-1995', Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol.49, no.3, 2001, 611-29.

(30) Yujiro Hayami, 'From the Washington consensus to the post-Washington consensus: Retrospect and prospect', Asian Development Review, vol.20, no.2, 2003, 40-65.

(31) Imran Ali and Syed M Ali, A Note on the Seed Business in Pakistan, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, 2004, 1.

(32) Ali and Ali, 23.

(33) Rossett.

(34) Mansuri and Jacoby, 763.

(35) Mansuri and Jacoby, 765.

(36) Rashid Faruqee and Kevin Carey, Land Markets in South Asia: What Have We Learned?, World Bank, Washington, 1997.

(37) IFAD.

(38) Syed M Ali and Pamela Kilpadi, 'Humanitarian response and governance in Pakistan: Overcoming elite capture', World Conference of Humanitarian Studies, Groningen, Netherlands, February 2009.

(39) Ali and Kilpadi.

Syed Mohammad Ali

Development Studies