From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

FROM POVERTY TO POWERLAND REFORM‘Land and Liberty!’ ran the battle cry of Emiliano Zapata that inspiredMexico’s peasantry to rise up in the Mexican revolution of 1910–17.And the resulting reforms help to explain Mexico’s relative prosperityin the decades that followed. Land reform was a central feature ofrevolutions in China, Russia, Cuba, and Viet Nam, and the first step onthe path of economic transformation in several East Asian ‘tiger’economies. Especially in predominantly peasant societies, landreform can transform power relations and get at the root of social andeconomic inequality (see Table 2.1).Skewed land ownership is a core driver of inequality – womengrow between 60–80 per cent of the food produced in most developingcountries, yet own less than 2 per cent of the land. 92 Land empowers:research in Kerala, India, found that almost half of women who ownedno property reported physical violence compared with only 7 per centwho did own property. Other studies have shown that women who donot own land are statistically more likely also to be infected withHIV. 93 Indigenous groups like Bolivia’s Chiquitanos (see the casestudy on page 31) see control over traditional territories as a core partof their identity. Redistributing land can also boost the economy.Farmers who are secure on their land are more likely to invest inupgrading production, and may find it easier to borrow money.Struggles over land can be particularly acute following a disaster.Earthquakes, droughts, or wars drive people off their land and, in theaftermath, powerful local elites and businesses often look to seizeland whose ownership is poorly defined. Women left widowed arefrequently dispossessed, sometimes by their own family members.Resisting such pressures and ensuring a fair distribution of land is avital role for the state and others after such shocks.The rise of powerful indigenous and landless movements incountries such as Bolivia, Brazil, India, and the Philippines hasbrought land reform back onto the agenda in recent years after itdisappeared in the 1980s, when development orthodoxy saw it asintolerably interventionist for the state to be involved in redistribution.The results can be spectacular. In Cambodia from 1998–2001,unprecedented co-operation between government and civil society74