Adivasis against the land grab in Kashipur, India

This remarkable video, created by ActionAid India, highlights the struggles of adivasi people against land grabs in rural India. Their struggle has resulted in some action by the Indian state; but far more needs to be done.

resistance to land grabbing in Mali and Uganda

An excellent expose of the impact of land grabbing in Mali: Followed by an excellent expose of the impact of land grabbing in Uganda:

Glen, Gary and Ross: a film about land grabs

An excellent short video from Oxfam that explains the motivations behind land grabbing in developing countries.

international views on land issues in Vietnam

The BBC Vietnamese service has followed up my earlier interview with a further series of questions regarding international attitudes towards land issues in Vietnam. In English, here and the questions and the answers that I gave:

1. Do academics have the same mind about this issue, or is there a
debate? For example, does your view encounter any objection from other
academics or donors?

Within the academic and donor community there is a serious debate about the meaning of shifting access to land in Vietnam. This is slightly different than the issue of land disputes, which are indeed generally viewed as being symptomatic of general failures to deal with corruption. The key distinction here, then, is the extent to which people within the academic and donor community feel that it would be possible for the existing institutional structure of state and party to deal with corruption around land. There are some that a reasonably optimistic: that the state and party are, at the very top, led by senior cadres that recognize the legitimacy of peasant grievances and want to solve problems in a way that does not undermine Vietnam's ongoing transition. Indeed, some have argued that Vietnam's transition is itself the outcome of an implicit political agreement between reform-minded senior cadres that have bypassed the bureaucracy in the state and the party in order to meet the demands of the peasantry, who in turn have sought reform because they know the ways in which the political economy does not work and seek changes to it in order to improve their lives. At the other end of the spectrum there are those who believe that the inability to deal with corruption around land disputes signals a more systemic failure that is incapable of being resolved. People recognize the failure of the system; however, they basically go about their business, and try and avoid the state and party as much as possible, in order to create a better life for themselves and their families. According to these commentators, political opposition is limited because of the risks it entails, but the lack of an opposition does not signal an acceptance of the political and economic order in contemporary Vietnam.

The views I expressed in the last interview on the character of land disputes would and would not be challenged within the academic and donor community. My views on peri-urban disputes and disputes in the Central Highlands are pretty well accepted; my views on landlessness are not accepted by donors, but are accepted within some academic circles, and particularly, in my experience, within Vietnamese academic circles.

2. The agrarian transition and its impact on rural Vietnam for the past
20 years must have attracted attention from international donors like
the World Bank and international NGOs. Are their assessments largely
positive or negative? And do they have any say on the government's
policies?

This is a very, very broad question--we could spend days discussing it. The first point to stress is that the donor community in Hanoi is not a homogenous or monolithic block. There are differences of opinion within it, between, say, the World Bank and UNDP, between international NGOs and some of the multilateral donors. What the donor community has tried to do for the past decade is to develop, as much as is possible, a consensus between the multilateral donors, the bilateral donors and the international NGOs regarding how best to move forward to continue the transition. The purpose behind this consensus-building exercise is to have a greater impact on government. My experience with government is that it listens very carefully to what the international community says, it often takes elements of the advice that is offered, but the Vietnamese government is not reliant on the international community to any great extent. The Vietnamese government is far more independent of the international community than many of the other partners around the world serviced by the international community.

Now, on the issue of the agrarian transition: here, there are major differences of opinion. The World Bank is fairly explicit in its views: changing access to land, and particularly rising landlessness, signals the success of the transition. It demonstrates a responsive market economy in which people shift their occupations in order to do the best for themselves. What is therefore necessary is an appropriate social safety net and social investment that facilitates this process of shifting jobs into better paid activities. UNDP in Hanoi, on the other hand, takes a different view: that the argumentation offered by the World Bank is based upon a very limited and questionable set of evidence, and thus that outsiders have very little understanding of social and economic dynamics in the countryside. Bilateral donors and international NGOs seem to treat changing access to land as an issue of poverty alleviation, and not inequality creation. This is, it should be said, at odds with my own views on changing patterns of access to land and landlessness in rural Vietnam, which is, in my view, constructing a significant set of social issues that the government will have to face in the future. Indeed, senior researchers at the World Bank in Washington have written a working paper that is, in part, designed to explicitly rebut my propositions. What am I saying? Putting it bluntly: Vietnam is becoming a much more unequal society, and while a significant part of this inequality is urban-rural, there has been a major increase in inequality within the countryside. Rising landlessness in the countryside is a sign of this increasing inequality. The political and social issue that the state and the party will have to face is that in the countryside those who are doing well or indeed very well often have connections to the state and the party--particularly in the Mekong River Delta, but also elsewhere. This means that the state and the party are, in the countryside, associated with rising inequality. That is a big political problem if the peasantry starts to see the rise in inequality as a systemic issue.

One final point I should stress: as an outsider, I am aware that my own knowledge is extremely limited even if I have been working in rural Vietnam for almost a decade. However, I am quite confident in my arguments because Vietnamese academics that I discuss these issues with find my views to most closely mirror their own understanding of the social and economic processes at work in rural Vietnam.

land disputes in Vietnam

Last week the BBC's Vietnamese service did an interview with me on land disputes in Vietnam. The full text, in Vietnamese, is available at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/story/2007/07/070710_land_disputes_interview.shtml

The English-language version of the interview reads as follows:

1. What do you think are the roots of the problems?

The roots of the problems differ somewhat around the country, and particular between the peri-urban regions around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the Central Highlands, and the rice basket in the Mekong and Red River deltas. In the peri-urban areas, despite property rights that are in theory much more secure than in China, by way of comparison, there is still a large degree of discretion on the part of local communes with regards to their ability to administratively acquire land at a less than market price. This means that the acquisition of land is a significant source of earnings from corruption, and many disputes in Vietnam, particularly those staged in Hanoi or in Ho Chi Minh City, reflect peasant resistance to corrupt practices on the part of local government. In the Central Highlands, the issue of corruption is also there, strongly there, but it is also tied in to how land has been allocated to incoming migrants to the area at the expense of indigenous peoples that in many instances have cultivation practices at odds with those suggested by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Finally, in the deltas, there is the issue of rising landlessness. For many this is a reflection of increased prosperity. However, for far more, I think, this is a reflection of debt-induced distress, distress that peasants would like to see addressed by local governments, but which are not, in part because it is local party people who acquire the land to add to their own--party people can be big farmers in rural Vietnam.

Many would argue that these failures in rural 'governance' reflect the lack of an independent judiciary and the rule of legally-binding contracts in Vietnam. The rule of law is highly politicized, all the more so in the countryside. I would agree with this, but would also suggest that more is going on, most particularly massive rises in rural inequality and in urban rural inequality that the government seems powerless to address--or indeed does not want to address because so many local cadres are implicated in benefiting from rural inequality.

2. Based on your observation over the years, are land disputes in
Vietnam likely to get worse, to the level of what happens in China
currently?

This is an interesting question. Land disputes in China are well known and documented--the figure that I commonly quote is around 87000 a year. In Vietnam we do not know the extent of land disputes. However, for land disputes to be on the scale that they are witnessed in China would require only 5075 disputes a year in Vietnam. I suspect--but I have no basis to substantiate this--that land disputes each year number far more. In other words, I believe the land dispute situation to already be worse in Vietnam than in China.

3. Are there any solutions, or this is an inevitable result of the
current transition in Vietnam?

Peasant unrest is very cautious in rural Vietnam. Cautious in the sense that it is rare for it to take issue with either the state or the Party. Rather, it takes on the whole issue with individuals (although there are well documented instances of state and party property being vandalized, and state and party cadres being held in forced captivity). In part, this reflects the highly decentralized character of the Vietnamese state--local government officials in most of the country tend to come from the area that they run. They know their neighbours and their families, and people resent people that they know using the state to get rich. So the issue, particularly in rural areas, is personalized. This is important for the government--it does not call into question the system as a whole. If, then, the government could make a serious effort at tackling corruption, the problem would be significantly affected.

However, and this is the important part, corruption is endemic. The relationship between the party and wealth accumulation is so completely interwoven that to try and tackle corruption must mean, eventually, tackling the position of the party in the state--and that is not tenable at this current stage. Moreover, in my view, many people in the party and the government know that the current system is not sustainable. It will collapse, it is just a matter of time. They therefore are using their connections to make as much money as they can while they can before this source of patronage disappears. This is why, for example, the private sector in Vietnam is built by those with party connections, to see them through its eventual demise and to ensure that their wealth continues beyond. In this light, it is no coincidence that those in the countryside with the largest landholdings are always those with party or state connections (or both).

The problem for the party, from a sustainability point of view, is that the government's rule is built upon bringing prosperity to the countryside. If, for whatever reason, this is called into question by the peasantry, there are implications for social stability that the party knows far, far too well. So they have to do something about rural unrest, and their answer is get more wealth to the countryside--as in China. However, this does not do anything about specific land-based grievances, and thus does not tackle some of the systemic issues facing rural Vietnam.

So, is there a solution? In theory, yes. In practice, not that I can see.

new times for the agrarian question?

I was very pleased this morning to walk into my local Indigo! bookstore and see, on the shelves, half a dozen copies of Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform, edited by Peter Rosset, Raj Patel and Michael Courville. This book, along with Reclaiming the Land, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, and my own volume, Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization, co-edited with Jun Borras and Cris Kay, indicate that within both activist and advocacy groups as well as within academic circles in international development studies, land reform is most definitely back.

It is back, though, in a vastly different context. In the heyday of state-led land reform, in the 1950s and 1960s, land reform was about trying to promote national development and poverty alleviation. Today, in the era of market-led land reform, globalization has meant that land reform is about promoting agricultural commodification and agro-exports, the integration of peasant farmers into buyer-driven global agro-commodity chains, and their effective reconfiguration as little more than sub-contracted piece workers that own or control a small piece of land but who do not own or control their own means of subsistence, tied as it is, through contract farming, to agro-food TNCs. It is in this context that the dispossession of farmers in the South has become such an important issue. Unlike previous episodes of land reform, which were about building markets, development and capitalism, the current conjuncture is one dominated by dispossession.

I have been struck recently as to how different people can arrive at the same conclusion, even if separated by time and space. In the late 1990s Farshad Araghi cogently argued that the current period was witnessing peasant displacement through dispossession as, prefiguring the powerful arguments of Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, the increasing capital intensity of agriculture in the South, as a consequence of 25 years of debt-induced structural adjustment programmes, have led to the expulsion of rural populations from the land and their enforced migration to the cities. This is the new reserve army of labour, increasing casualized, insecure, footloose, and often hungry. I have seen them, in Ho Chi Minh City, in Peshawar, in Suva, in Nairobi, and beyond. More recently, David Harvey, in The New Imperialism, has termed this 'accumulation by dispossesion', as corporate profitability is increasing predicated upon massive rural displacement to the slums of megacities in the South. In our own recent book, Jun, Cris and I termed this 'neo-liberal re-enclosure', as the admittedly limited gains from land reform over the period between 1945 to 1975--often gains ceded to preclude peasant revolutionary movements--are rolled back under the guise of neo-liberal structural adjustment policies. These policies made it increasingly harder for poor farmers to make a living, even as they made it easier for agro-food TNCs to seek to organize their activities on a global scale, in partnership, at times with peasant farmers, but also, at times, in partnership with capitalist farmers, feudal landlords, plantations, and comprador elites and states in the South. Different times indeed.

Dispossession is the dominant agrarian issue of our time, and it is this issue which has given rise to resistance in the South, in the form of the Via Campesina and its various constituent elements--most notably the MST, but a host of other movements as well. Via Campesina seeks food sovereignty, and here, in this call, lies the basis of a global alternative to industrialized agriculture and a buyer-driven agro-food commodity chain, for it is in this call that a possible alliance between producers in the South (and the North) and consumers in the North might be made. As I had to remind my (often pessimistic) students a month ago, similar alliances were witnessed within the US in the early 1970s. They can be built. However, it is up to us to build them.