SMALL LANDOWNERS AND LAND DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN, 1962–71

Abstract

During the Cold War years following World War II, the U.S. government and international agencies such as the World Bank and FAO strongly advocated and pushed for land reform (distribution) in countries under U.S. influence. Examples of American-sponsored land reforms included the land-distribution programs in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, and El Salvador. Land reform in practice consisted of giving the ownership of land to the cultivating tenants and sharecroppers. By giving land to the tenants, it was believed that a communist revolution or takeover could be avoided. The modern theoretical basis for land reform can be found in the writings of such Marxist scholars as Alain de Janvry, the non-Marxist writers Albert Berry and William Cline, and the World Bank economists Hans Binswanger and Miranda Elgins.¹ Marxist writers had stressed the political aspects of “anti-feudal” reforms. Such reforms were said to promote political stability as well as strengthen capitalism. How the abrogation of private-property rights was supposed to “strengthen” capitalism was not really explained. Non-Marxist writers concentrated on increased efficiency and increased output that was expected from land redistribution. Berry and Cline showed that in labor-surplus underdeveloped dual economies with a bi-modal farm structure (where large commercial and small subsistence farms existed side by side), a land reform that redistributed land from large farms to small farms increased agricultural production and rural welfare, and brought about economic growth and development. In addition, land reform was seen to result in greater social equity (taking land from wealthy landowners and giving it to poor farmers). It was an article of faith among the proponents of land reform that “the hated class of absentee landlords” did not fulfill any useful socio-economic function, at least none that could not be performed equally well by some government agency. They also believed that sharecropping and tenancy did not fulfill any useful social and economic functions. It was implicitly assumed in the theoretical writings that the rights of a small number of individuals were to be sacrificed for the benefit of the many. In none of the theoretical literature was the possibility of expropriating a large number of individuals advocated or even considered.