With population growth and climate change, the agrarian question appears as a factor of social and international tensions. However, land scarcity is not a physical given, but results from the land grabbing by multinationals or dominant classes.
Can agricultural land be a major political issue and land hunger the driving force behind the political tribulations of societies? There is little doubt about this in the past. For the reader of Titus Livius, access to land, the debt trap into which small farmers fall, and the highly unequal sharing of conquered lands are key elements of social conflicts (internal conflicts) and Roman territorial expansion (external conflicts). The murders of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus inaugurate the cycle of violence that will precipitate the end of the Roman Republic: their cause is the land struggle between patricians and plebeians. But what about today?
The land issue
Industrialization and the development of the tertiary sector, urbanization that is moving people away from the countryside, the food overabundance made possible by industrial agriculture, oil that frees agriculture from the need to produce energy: all this has made the land issue, if not marginal, at least imperceptible for people in industrialized countries. Only, from time to time, a surprising purchase of land (as was the case for the investment of a Chinese company in 1,700 hectares in Berry) arouses public opinion, to the point of leading to the promulgation of a law on “the fight against the monopolization of agricultural land and the development of biocontrol.”
This French emotion is only a muffled echo of a phenomenon that is very present on a global level. This is what Pierre Blanc has tried to illustrate, in order to “highlight the universal nature of mechanisms, beyond the phenomena specific to each political space”. To do this, he takes us on a vast historical and geographical panorama, successively analyzing the agrarian question in Europe, in the two Americas, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East and in Africa.
What universal mechanisms can be broadly outlined? In the first agrarian societies, a generally communal management of the land prevails. Communal does not mean egalitarian. The land belongs to the community, with the exception of small garden plots near the houses; it is not demarcated, not individually appropriated and cannot be sold. The very idea of trading in land does not exist. These communities are generally governed by customary chiefs, one of whose functions is to distribute the land between families and clans.
A decisive tipping point occurs when the idea of land ownership emerges. This is what Rousseau had already identified in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men :
The first person who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying: This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horrors would not have spared the human race, he who, tearing up stakes or filling in a ditch, had cried out to his fellow men: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and that the earth belongs to no one.”
The principle of land ownership opens the door to its seizure by the now dominant classes and to the establishment of a lasting and even structural inequality between large landowners and laborers. The land chiefs, responsible for its more or less arbitrary distribution, become owners of the land, granting it, often in a precarious manner, to peasants in exchange for royalties that can exceed two thirds of production. land rent The money thus created is reinvested in other land purchases, speeding up the process.
Little by little, as the vagaries of events and irrepayable debts take their toll, even small landowners become sharecroppers for the landowners. As long as population growth is strong, the balance of power between landowners and sharecroppers allows the former to demand increasingly higher royalties. This state of affairs seriously harms agricultural productivity: small, precarious farmers have neither the means nor the desire to invest in land improvement.
As for the large landowners, often absentee, they use their income either for ostentatious spending or to buy new land. The social situation often becomes explosive. In many agrarian states, the central power tries, from time to time, to limit the phenomenon of land grabbing, but very often the large landowners dominate the regime.
Colonization and expropriation
European colonization systematically spread the principle of property. With varying intensity, depending on the state of the colonized societies and the contingent choices of the colonial powers, it is similar to a major expropriation. In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns, in the continuity of the Reconquest of the peninsula, favor large latifundia, first by theencomendation (system of exploitation of populations, but without attribution of property rights), then by thehacienda (property by right). At independence, South American regimes were dominated by large landowning families and, in a sense, remained so.
On the contrarythe colonization of North America was the work of exploitative landowners. This would be one of the explanatory factors for the difference in development: here, a conservative landed aristocracy; there, an industrial democracy. In other settlement colonies, such as Algeria or South Africa, the colonists seized the good land and the colonial power generally came to an agreement with the local elites. Medium and large properties then coexisted, often geared towards export.
Where colonization was not a settlement enterprise, the colonial power either did not have the time and the means to leave a lasting mark on the land structure (its attitude was essentially predatory, as in the Congo), or relied on a local class of landowners or land chiefs, transformed into owners by the introduction of property rights. Allenby declares: “The English can evacuate Egypt with a clear heart: they have in fact created a class of large landowners on whom Great Britain can count to ensure its policy in Egypt.” From these propertied classes will emerge both the best relays of colonization and its fiercest opponents, depending on the degree of nationalist consciousness.
The agrarian question has played a crucial role in the history of XXe century. The Russian and Chinese revolutions are above all the skillful use, by minority groups, of the immense exasperation of small farmers with conservative regimes, and their hunger for land. The promise of agrarian reform will allow the peasant masses to be won over, even if it means subsequently transforming the redistribution of land into collectivization. The United States understood this so well that it was they who encouraged agrarian reforms in their satellite countries, with more success in Asia (Korea, Taiwan) than in Latin America. Prevention is better than cure.
The Absentee Landlord: A Curse
With population growth and climate change, the agrarian question, inseparable from that of water, has returned to the agenda, if it had ever left it. It imposes itself as a factor of internal tensions in rural societies, but also as a factor of international tensions between deficit countries, seeking through investments to ensure their supplies, and the countries where these investments are made, often by driving out peasant communities.
While land alone does not explain all conflicts, it is often one of the factors, and not the least. But it is clear – this is the spirit of this essay – that the land problem is in no way comparable to the sole question of land scarcity. Certainly, the quantity of arable land is limited on a global scale, but this objective limitation is not enough to explain the problem.
On several occasions and concerning all continents, Pierre Blanc evokes the under-use of land held within large estates. Powerful families accumulate land that is very imperfectly developed, or even left fallow, contributing to creating land hunger among small farmers. Sometimes, the authorities have no other option than to open pioneer fronts, to the detriment of the forest. The large absentee landowner appears to be the absolute curse, both from a social and environmental point of view.
Land scarcity is therefore not primarily a physical given; it is often a social construct. Symptomatically, the countries of Western Europe have all come to this point over the XXe century, to promote legal systems that were very favorable to farmers, to the detriment of large landowners. If the land was not “given to the peasant”, he was given a right of use that took precedence over the right of ownership, within the framework of very comprehensive agricultural policies, which also addressed the issue of access to credit, the strengthening of farmers’ investment capacity, their training, etc.
The tax weapon
Pierre Blanc, whose clarity of writing and reasoning is never denied, offers us an extremely useful panorama. The choice to review the different continents may put off the reader looking for a brief summary, but it will greatly interest the reader looking for a synoptic view allowing comparison and perspective. The author, maintaining his analytical stance, has not sought to conclude in a performative manner, by proposing models of land policies, even if we feel his sympathy for peasant aspirations.
A small regret: since his reasoning focuses essentially on land management, its modes of appropriation and use, the author does not address the tool of land taxation which remains, beyond agrarian reforms, the surest long-term means of dissuading owners from accumulating poorly developed land. It is precisely this tax pressure that forced the great Roman landowners of IIIe century to grant tenants long leases (often 25 years) with a quasi-right of ownership: emphyteutic leases. There is no doubt that this system played its part in the recovery of the Empire in the IVe century.
Rather than an often costly and uncertain policy of agrarian reform requiring compensation for owners, the tax tool makes it possible to achieve this objective, while ensuring revenue for the State. Of course, it is necessary to succeed in bringing in taxes and therefore confront the lobby of the ultra-rich – a very topical subject, not only for land.
At the end of the book, we understand that history is far from over and that the land grabbing – and more broadly that of natural resources on a global scale – constitutes a threat to civil peace as well as to international peace. The agro-history of the world therefore did not stop in the middle of the XXe century; it is part of our present and our future. Good reason to be interested in it.