Guiding Principles:
Land Tenure in Development Cooperation

Orientierungsrahmen:
Bodenrecht und Bodenordnung

Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Technische Zusammenarbeit
Abt. 45 / Div. 45

The respective formulation and shaping of land tenure systems have a crucial influence on socioeconomic development. The land tenure systems, a framework and impetus for individual and group dealings, shape and mold the degree and direction of economic development, policy making, power structures within a society, transformation processes and the way in which the people relate to their natural environment. This is especially true for agricultural and rural development, but it is also increasingly true for suburban areas.

The following issues are a preliminary highlight of the many conflict-laden mutual relationships between the final shaping of land tenure systems and the achievement of development objectives:

The concentration of the most fertile lands by large landholders, for example, in Latin America leads to a suboptimal combination of production factors (land, labor and capital). Smallholders in serious difficulty are often forced to intensify their farming and to place a high value on present consumption at the expense of long-term investments, while large farms having extensive fertile lands use them very extensively or leave them fallow. Their intensification and growth potential were thus insufficiently realized. Economic liberalization, export-oriented policies and new economic unions (e.g. MERCOSUR, ASEAN), however, bring about changes expediently.

This bimodal land distribution is only slowly being replaced by a growing group of dynamic, productive and market-integrated mid-sized farms. Examples such as Chile show that agrarian reform can contribute considerably to the creation of these types of agricultural business forms.

Smallholders often destroy the ecological balance by farming unsuitable natural areas, for example, steep slopes having a high erosion potential. In their daily struggle for survival, they often have no other choice than to overexploit their limited resources. Environmental problems in many regions and poverty could also be reduced by a redistribution of (land) resources. However, also large farms often contribute to the destruction of the ecological balance by cultivation monocultures and by excessive pesticide applications.

(translated after BMU 1992:19)

If property rights in land are uncertain and constantly in question, then measures for the protection of resources are hindered. Farmers will only invest long-term in the preservation of their natural resources if they can be sure that they will receive the returns on their investments.

Despite the rapid structural change, more recognition and discussion must take place also in agrarian societies because the problems of land access and the right to employment cannot be solved independently as they are interconnected. This is true for the majority of African countries, for Asian countries and those transforming economies in which the agricultural sector still plays an important role in employment opportunities.

However, the fact that in Asia, for example, approximately three-fourths of the agricultural households no longer have sufficient land to secure their livelihood and multiple employment as well as employment and income outside the agricultural sector are gaining importance can no longer be ignored. Accessibility to diversified employment opportunities with agriculture being only one of many alternatives and less so the accessibility to land require changes in land tenure systems and require new legal and regulatory provisions regarding the functions of land.

When disputes on the access to land and its use become violent, the consequences are usually an intransigent enforcement of the existing legal framework. However, deficiencies in existing land tenure systems and land policy then become evident. They often do not enable, in addition to legal security and efficient management, social compensation and the stemming and arbitration of far-reaching conflicts. Land conflicts are central to the civil war-like conditions in some African, Latin American and Asian countries. While violent disputes for the immediate access to land and water in Africa and the Near East, for example, are between livestock keepers and farmers of arable land, in Latin America those conflicts are primarily between the landless and large landholders and between the landless and indigenous communities.

Land Tenure Systems, Concentration of Power and Participation

The development of market forces due to liberalization, globalization, newly formed regional associations (APEC, ASEAN, MERCOSUR, NAFTA, SADC) and regulatory and policy reforms has reminded the public conscience once again that, historically, land issues are also power issues. Economic and political power facilitates the concentration of land and as a result intensify the concentration of power amongst a few. Many members of the society are forced to live under marginalized conditions. This has already been seen in the history of failed agrarian reforms in Latin America.

Currently, in many countries market-assisted land reforms, restitution of expropriated land, and newly emerging land markets show that the rural and urban elite and a corrupt administration are very active in using their early knowledge to amass large areas of land and to further develop their power. Urban and rural poor, especially women, hardly participate in this process of change and thus remain a marginal group.

Economic development, market economy reforms and transformation have (once again) moved the relevant economic order and the legal regulatory policy into the focal point of development policy discussions. Agrarian reforms, especially newly designed land tenure system will have key functions. In this process the main goal of agrarian reform is therefore to secure an independent, market-oriented organization of agriculture whether it be a collective, e.g. as an autonomous cooperative, a family farm or a private medium or large-sized farm with wage earners.

The elementary condition for success is the clarification of the term ‘property’ and the identification of the aspired model. While private property became the model for increasing productivity and sustainability in agriculture in Germany after the reunification, many of the successor countries of the Soviet Union and in Central and Eastern Europe are striving towards these goals within different systems land ownership (private property, "collective property," and state property).

In the next millennium the majority of people worldwide will live in cities. The number of "megacities" having a population greater than ten million will grow to 25 with 19 of them being in developing countries (WBGU 1993). This rapid urbanization process challenges institutions of urban land tenure like the efficient registry of deeds or urban planning activities tremendously and requires innovative future-oriented concepts.

The number of informal, in part illegal settlements and places of work in suburban areas is growing. Uncertain rights for building on land hinder investment decision making and the creation of job opportunities, promote land speculation and invoke new conflicts on ownership and user rights.

The rapid growth of cities creates diverse massive environmental and waste disposal problems within a very small area. A clear designation of responsibility through the identification of the owners and users of landed property is, therefore, an elementary prerequisite for the identification of those causing pollution, for the allocation of costs and for the development of cost-sharing procedures for a reduction of environmental pollution.