Fwd: FW: [LaoFAB] Smallholders can spearhead growth

[Dr.Samai Jai-Indr]

Great points about land reform and poverty reduction through small farm holder empowerment. I hope it is not too late to turn the heads of other economist gurus who are still working hard to reform the farm sector along the 'Bretton-wood' lines of thoughts.

 

Samai

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sabrina Shaw <sab...@iisd.org>
Date: 20 Apr 2010 22:59
Subject: FW: [LaoFAB] Smallholders can spearhead growth
To: "Dr.Samai Jai-In" <sam...@gmail.com>, Chatthip Nartsupha <chat...@yahoo.com>, "Char...@gmail.com" <Char...@gmail.com>, "peac...@gmail.com" <peac...@gmail.com>, Seri Phongphit <ser...@hotmail.com>, apichai puntasen <apich...@hotmail.com>, "Bund...@chula.ac.th" <Bund...@chula.ac.th>

Dear All (especially Dr. Samai),

You are going to love this article from the Financial Times of London ... smallholder spearhead growth!

with kind regards from sunny Brasilia,
Sabrina

Sabrina Shaw
Ph.D. Candidate, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok
Associate, International Institute for Sustainable Development
Asa Sul - SQS 213, Bloco E105
Brasilia D.F. 70292-050
Brazil
tel: (55 61) 3254 0949
cel: (55 61) 8506 3523
e-mail: Sab...@iisd.org
Skype: sabrinashaw
________________________________________
From: lao...@googlegroups.com [lao...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Secretariat [Le...@laoex.org]
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 7:00
To: LaoFAB
Subject: [LaoFAB] Smallholders can spearhead growth

*Smallholders can spearhead growth*

Financial Times, London (Letters), 20 April 2010

From Prof Michael Lipton.

Sir, Prof J.R. Shackleton (Letters, April 9) claims that “the history
of land redistribution ... gives few, if any, successful models”, and
that in South Africa “agricultural productivity would almost certainly
slump as big farms were broken into smaller units”. He is wrong. A
large majority of studies, some in Africa, show that smallholders in
developing areas (often despite policies skewed against them) produce
more per hectare than big farmers.

The land reforms of the 1950s in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea –
ostensibly tenancy reforms but with ceilings on land ownership – were
followed by rapid growth in farm output. So were land reforms in West
Bengal, India, in 1969-84. China underwent a terrible detour through
collectivisation but in 1977-84 shifted to highly equal, tiny family
farms. Together with market liberalisation and technical progress,
this unleashed explosive growth in agricultural productivity. Vietnam
later followed a similar sequence. Where rapid technical progress was
available, Asia's smallholders spearheaded the green revolution:
rapid, widespread smallholder-based farm growth, alongside massive,
employment-based poverty reduction.

African smallholders were until recently held back by governmental and
donor underemphasis on irrigation, research and other farm support –
and in the “settler economies” of eastern and southern Africa by land
concentration into big farms. Yet smaller farms, for example after
early land reform in Kenya, performed at least as well as larger
farms. Even in Zimbabwe, until the mid-1990s (before Robert Mugabe’s
brutal politicisation derailed the reform process) small-to-medium
family farms did well, though semi-collectives did not.

Why is poverty reduction so dependent on smallholders, and hence often
on land reform? Over 70 per cent of the world’s dollar-poor are rural.
Mostly they are underemployed and can save little. With labour cheap
and capital costly, efficiency as well as poverty reduction points to
employment-intensive farming. However, big farmers face high costs of
labour supervision. So they usually farm less intensively, produce
less per hectare, and provide less income for the poor.

Prof Shackleton is also wrong that land reform in South Africa “would
do nothing to improve the dreadful lot of [the] urban and peri-urban
poor”. These are indeed numerous, ill-paid and underemployed, but that
is due largely to South Africa’s lack of land reform. Eighty per cent
of land is with the largest 2 per cent of farms. Most of it provides
little work per hectare. Reforming about one-third of it into family-
based smallholdings, as repeatedly recommended by South African and
World Bank economists, would boost employment and self-employment
income, reduce the flow of labour to the cities, and thus relieve
urban as well as rural poverty. Of course, pseudo-reform that shifts
land from white to black fat cats, or imposes collectivism, will not
help.

Michael Lipton,
Research Professor of Economics,
Sussex University,
Brighton, UK

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Dr.Samai Jai-Indr,
RTN Pomprachul, Samutprakarn