Let’s you, Cyberista and Che go grab our guns!
There’s a revolution afoot in Zimbabwe, some land to be rescued from the clutches of white European imperialists, and delivered to landless blacks.
Never mind that Zimbabwe’s 4,500 white commercial farmers feed Zimbabwe and most of Southern Africa. Never mind that aid agencies predict that up to 13 million people in six southern African countries face starvation by February due to a cease in agricultural production. Never mind that Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s “one farmer, one farm policy” has cost 70,000 black farm workers their jobs and affected 250,000 dependants.
We shall expel the colonial invaders at all costs.
No doubt, the patterns of land distribution pertaining in Zimbabwe today are a direct result of the country’s colonial past. There is something inherently wrong with white minority control of Zimbabwe’s most productive land.
There is also something wrong with the repressed, metrepole-centered financial systems inherited from colonialism.
In most developing countries, there are no efficient vehicles for savings. For the very poor in these countries, markets don’t function well; the landless have no way to save their most productive assets (the present and future value of their crops).
Borrowing is their only option to maintain control of these assets; they must buy seeds and/or equipment, send their children to school, etc.
Still, “where to borrow?” is a phenomenon common to poor people everywhere. No assets, i.e., collateral equals no loan in both rich and developing countries (an asset market-failure).
Things that may be useful in rich countries, like credit-history checks, are almost useless in developing countries.
In developing countries, LAND is the only viable form of collateral. Labor would be an excellent source, if indentured servitude were still legal.
An equitable distribution of land would vitiate the asset market-failure in developing countries.
So, should Mugabe implement a radical program of land redistribution in Zimbabwe?
While a radical program of land redistribution might certainly be necessary, it is far from sufficient.
There must also be a web of institutions in place to ensure that the poor do not use the land as collateral for loans, and use it instead for productive purposes, i.e., growing food to feed the starving population.
Land reform in itself is not good enough. Redistribution is useless without functioning credit and insurance markets.
Without these markets, land reform sets in motion a viscous cycle: small land holders use land as collateral; local financial institutions make loans; bankers become efficient makers of small loans to those they know well; before long, you have one primary land holder that re-institutes a policy of sharecropping, and you’re back to square one.
Mugabe could prevent this by not allowing the peasants to use the land as collateral.
What he could not prevent is the bad signal sent to peasants by a redistribution program that redistributes through force. Landholders think they are next, and have no incentive to save or invest, as happened in France and Russia.
The answer to Zimbabwe’s land redistribution woes is not shipments of biogenetically engineered grains from the U.S, or crippling economic sanctions; it’s a series of institutional and market reforms.
Tell Che to put his gun away.
