Java are moved to sparsley populated locations in the much larger islands of Sumatra,

Kalimantan (Borneo), Sulawesi (Celebes), and irian jaya (West New Guinea).
There are several distinctions and debates that feature in all these land access
transations. The first distribution versus collectivization. Some land reforms
distribute former landowner holdings to tenants, agricultural workers, and others with
a claim to access. Other prefer to keep large holdings intact, or even to amalgamate
holdings, in order to operate them as state or communal farms. This is a consequence,
second, of the conflicting arguments about farm output growth : the small family
farm for efficiency versus the realization of economies of scale in large-scale
agriculture.
A third distinction is between the maintenance of various types of tenancy
(including leasehold from the state), and private ownership with freehold land title.
The slogan ‘land-to-the-tiller’, which is popular in connection with the politics of
land reform, is predominantly about the creation of freehold farms for former tenants
and landless workers.
The fourth distinction is between changing the ownership distribution of land
and changing the farm size distribution. These are not necessarily synonymous. Land
ownership can be changed- including distributing to tenants the land that they
formerly tilled on the landowners’ property without changing the boundaries or sizes
of cultivation units. A change in farm size distribution means actually redrawing the
map of agricultural cultivations, by dividing larger ownership units into smaller ones,
reducing or increasing the size of tenant farms, or amalgamating micro-plots into
family farms.
Instruments of land reform
The topics of instruments of land reform is alredy covered in part by the
discussions of paths of change in land ownership, tenancy, and farm size. The choices
made with respect to the end results of the land reform are in an important sense
instruments of the land reform process. In addition, however, land reform instruments
include such issues as the payment of compensation, the setting of exemptions or
ceilings, and the rules of distribution to land reform beneficiaries.
The main groups of land reform instruments can be identified. These are (i)
insruments of tenancy reform, (ii) instruments of land redistribution, and (iii)
instruments of land settlement.
The first and third of these groups can be dealt with quite quickly. Tenancy
reform does not involve the redistribution of existing private titles to land, it merely
changing the rules concerning legal and illegal types of contract between landowner
and tenant. Tenancy reform typically means the prohibition of certain feudalistic
types of tenancy mainly tied labour of various kind-and the modification of others-
e.g. by imposing a ceiling on the landowner’s share in share tenancy contracts. The
effectiveness of these instruments is compromised in practice by the diversity and
unwritten nature of the relations between landowners and tenants in many rural
situations (see below). Further instruments of tenancy reform are to convert feudal or
semi feudal tenancy arrangements to a cash rent basis and to impose rules on
landowners regarding the security of tenure of their tenants.
Land settlements likewise does not involve enforced redistribution of previous
private titles to land. It usually involves the release of state land for settlement, the
opening up of new lands for settlement, or the resettlement of land abandoned by
former owners. Land settlements requires a set of criteria and rules of deciding the
categories of rural dweller whe should be eligible to apply for a farm; the size of
holding that is appropriate given the soils, climate, and crop choices of the settlement
area; the amount of capital required by each settler in the form of loans to get started
on cultivation; the repayment rules fo those loans; whether to lease or sell the land to
its new occupiers; and the price and method of recoupment in the case of transfer of
freehold title.
Land redistribution does mean reallocating the ownership of land between
people,and the rules for this are a great dealmore difficult to formulate and to
implement than in either of the other more modest types of land reform. Warriner
(1969: 17-22) identifies four main components: expropriation, compensation,
exemption, and distribution. In the following paragraphs we examine each of these
briefly in turn :
Expropriation
The first step in a redistributive type of land reform is to expropriate the land
that it is intended to reallocate. This is politically the most difficult action amongst all
instruments of land reform. Where land reform comes about as a consequence of a
socialist revolution, expropriation may be automatic and widespread with few
exemptions. In all other cases, expropriation is the outcome of a political process
involving many trade-offs and compromises.
The most common instrument is to a set a ceiling for the amount of land that
landowners can retain for their own continued use, and to expropriate all land above
that area. The size of this ceiling has varied widely in different land reform, from 500
ha in iran, to 150 ha in some latin American land reforms, and between two and four
hectares in post-war Japanese land reform. These ceilings tend to reflect the pre-
existing farm size structure, the intensity of cultivation, and the nature of the pressure
for land reform by peasent political groupings. In some cases, expropriation has only
applied to land registered in particular types of holding, for example the colonial
zamindari types of land grant in india were expropriated in the post-independence
period.
Compensation
The amount of compensation for land reallocated in land reform legislation is
another difficult and highly charged matter. It is rare for there to be no compensation
at all, but also equally rare for the full market priece of land to be paid. It has usually
been beyond the financial capacity of land-reforming states to pay the full market
price for land confiscated. It is even doubtful whether a meaningful market price
could be defined in the political atmosphere that typically accompanies land reform.
One method of paying compensation is to take the value of land as registered
for land tax purposes. This undervalues the land by market price criteria, but is at
least consistent for all landowners. Compensation is often split into two components:
an immediate cash payment, and an allocation of government bonds redeemable at
some future date. Depending on the way this is set up, it is possible for the level of
compensation to be eroded by inflation so that the real cost to the state is much lower
than the nominal cost when compensation is agreed.
Evxemptions
Many land reforms in practice contain exemptions to the criteria that are
established in law for expropriation. These exemptions represent political
compromises in the drafting of legislation, and they can be fatal for the realization of
the goals of the reform. A common exemption in latin American land reforms was to
exempt land that could be shown to be already under ‘efficient’ farm production.
Apart from opening the door to interminable legal proceedings as to the meaning of
efficient agricultural use, this type of exemption means that the beneficiaries of the
land reform end up with the least fertile land.
Other exemption relate to institutional land owners (charitable bodies, mission
stations, church lands, etc.), corporate land owners (land farmed by registered
capitalist companies), or foreign land owners (land operated byforeign companies).
Distribution
Land reform legislation must also set down the criteria and instruments for
post-reform land allocation. In part, this involves decisions we have already
discussed, such as whether to distributed or to collectivise, whether to go for
tenancies or owner-occupier farms, whether to retain land under state ownership or
permit freehold registrations, and so on.
The allocation of land distributed after a land reform also involves criteria
concerning maximum and minimum sizes of holding, unless land is reassigned to
former tenants with no planned changes in holding size. A failure to set minimum
farm size could mean the advent of a large number of holdings that are below family
subsistence in output, and with fragmentation in later years these might become
uneconomic to operate. A failure to set maximum farm size has the reverse effect of
reducing the total number of holdings available, and permitting fewer, larger, farmers
a relatively high standard of living while other rural dwellers may remain landless
and extremely poor. Both minimum and maximum criteria are in practice rather
insentive instruments given the variability in soils, climate, topography, crop choices,
and other features of agricultural zones.
Problem of implementation
Land reform, like all public policy, is in part a shadow play involving the
manipulation of symbols; the actual policy demonstrably reflects
considerations more pressing and mundane than abstract ideals of social
justice or economic rationality. (Herring, 1983:3).
The are many reasons why the actual outcomes of land reforms do not live up
to the promises of the rhetoric that surrounds their legislation. Some of these reasons
are associated with compromises made during the legislatve process. Others are
related to the practical problems of implementation in an environment where the
losers will do their best to evade or thwart the intentions of the legislators. Some
common reasons for land reform to turn out very different in practice from its
theoretical intent are as follows :
(a) Foot dragging at the legislative stage. Opposition politicians ensure that
the legislation take months, even years, to become law. This delay gives landowners
more time to rearrange their property in order to evade exproportation (see below).
(b) Modifications and exemptions. In order to get land reform into law, its
promoters are forced to make numerous compromises in its scope and coverage, such
that the final legislation may no longer serve the original goals intended. A good
example is the agrarian reform law passed in the Philippines in 1998 (Putzel &
Cunnington, 1989: 63- 74).
(c) Evasions by landowners. Landlords have many ways of evading land
reform legislation, especially if given time to make the necessary arrangements
(Feder, 1970). Retention ceilings can be evaded by reregistering land in countless
different names. Land titles and registration documents can be altered by making
bribes to low-paid government officials in land registration offices. Tenancy
regulations can be circumvented by reaching side-agreements with tenants, or by
intimidating them into signing false documents.
(d) Timidity of tenants. Some types of land reform impose the onus for
making land tenancy or land title claims on tenants. Tenants may not understand their
rights and obligations under the new legislation, the paperwork may be too complex,
they may have been intimidated by landowners into ‘voluntarily’ ceding their rights,
they may fear that the land reform is short-lived and be therefore unprepared to
confront their landlords.
(e) Role of the courts. Many countries have a legal system that is, to some
degree, independent of the legislature, and that tends to be a conservative force in
society at large. Landowners may forestall compliance with the land reform
legislation by referring every case to the courts. Landowners may bring litigation to
the court that tests the interpretation of every clause in the legislation. The courts may
find loopholes and rule in favour of landowners, thus further undermining the
credibility and intention of the legislation.
(f) Legal title problems. Even in highly organized industrial societies, land
registration and transfer of titles can be time consuming and subject to lengthy delays.
Delays in issuing titles deeds for land confiscated under a land reform can result in
many types of intimidation and abuse. Landlords may reposses land that has been
distributed on the grounds that the new owners do not have legal title. Some peasants
may grab land off other peasants in order to enlarge the size of holdings that they
intend to register.
(g) Failures of institutional adaptation. It has been common to observe in the
wake of land reform that rural institutions and state bodies like banks, credit agencies,
input delivery outlets, and local palnning agencies fail to adjust fast enough to the
change in their clientele. Where these institutions have become used to dealing almost
exclusively with landowners in rural areas, they adapt inadequately to serving the
needs of the small producers, and their regulations may prohibit proper access by the
new farmers to the services they are supposed to provide (a classic ‘access’ problem-
see chapter 6).