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Land reform in the era of neoliberalism: case studies from the global South.

Article Excerpt
This is a propitious moment in which to research and write about land reform. For example, and as Zimbabwe's "fast-track" program exemplifies, land-reform efforts aiming to address the unequal distribution of land in specific national contexts can have broad impacts and grab headlines worldwide. And in other places, such as South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Philippines, land-reform efforts are creating tensions over the unequal distribution of land. The contemporary and contested place, meaning, and potential of land reform therefore demands further scholarly research.

This moment in which to examine land reform also stands out because of rising global commodity prices, which look set to continue their steady appreciation and, concomitantly, to threaten food crises and associated widespread social unrest. We sense that governments and populations experiencing rising bills for imported foodstuffs or, indeed, food shortages are unprepared to tackle maldistributions of land via new land-reform efforts, but the leftward turn of electorates in Venezuela and Bolivia and the renewed urgency with which land-reform programs seem likely to be pursued there suggest to us that other left-leaning governments may tackle the issue. Although Zimbabwe looked like a radical outlier in the early 2000s, we wonder whether its program presaged a new phase of land reform, especially given the joint pressures of rising food prices and climate change.

Beyond these examples, geohistorical studies of land reform are timely in light of broad changes in the ways in which land reform is conceived and pursued. Land reform once occupied a prominent place in debates regarding "development." The era of so-called classic redistributionist land reform, pursued for different reasons by communist/socialist as well as capitalist/modernizing states, targeted large landholdings, usually in the hands of...

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