With the decollectivization of Chinese agriculture between 1979 and 1983 and with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communal working of the land is today seldom advocated as land reform (although such farming practices continue in modified form in many parts of the former Soviet Union). And the argument for family farms remains contested. In an era when advances in technology mean that far fewer people can produce abundant harvests, many argue that agribusiness may provide cheaper foodstuffs for the market while releasing rural labor for other pursuits. The debate today, then, turns largely on the attractiveness and feasibility of increasing smallholdings for humanitarian and political reasons when “neoliberal” economic orthodoxy favors the greater productivity of large-scale commercial farming.

For smallholding to be successful, family farms ideally need enough land and equipment to support themselves without needing to rent out their labor or to hire the labor of others. The notion is perhaps best expressed in American history with the promise (soon abandoned) made to the former slaves, the freedmen, that their political liberty after the Civil War should be complemented by grants of “40 acres and a mule.” Such thinking reflected Thomas Jefferson’s conviction that the health of democracy depended on the “yeoman farmer,” a “freeholder” who neither hired out his labor nor required that of others beyond his family, and who thus had an independence of action economically and socially to act politically.

Not only the Americans have had such beliefs. Poor peasants everywhere want title to the land they farm, and they will fight fiercely to obtain it and support the party or government that awards it to them. Thus, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 called for the breakup of large landed estates and their replacement with a freeholding peasantry as the political backbone of a new country. Subsequently, agrarian reform in Latin America became synonymous with “land to the tiller” programs of the type that we see being promoted today in countries like Venezuela and Brazil.

While political goals have always been a primary objective of land reform, environmental and social goals have also been sought by this means. Thus, deforestation and general degradation of the soil and water might be alleviated as the landless acquire a greater stake in the future. Similarly, the hellbent pace of urbanization might be slowed by families who find on the land the resources that as tenant farmers, at the mercy of the landowners and natural conditions, they were so often denied. An important argument heard in recent years is that the empowerment of women as landowners may be a key element in slowing population growth.

Yet, whatever the noble intentions of land-to-the-tiller programs, they have seldom worked in practice. A first obstacle has often been the inability of the state to deliver. Consider the bureaucratic difficulties alone: land must be surveyed and titles registered, an undertaking requiring large trained and motivated staffs dedicated to an enterprise that may take years to complete. In addition, small farmers need bank credits to purchase the tools of their labor, agricultural-extension know-how provided by experts familiar with scientific innovations and market forces and an infrastructure that links them to faraway commercial centers. And when government fails to measure up to such requirements, a now partially empowered peasantry may be even harder to control than one that before was truly desperate.

Global market forces are still another challenge to effective land-reform efforts when international agribusiness uses its vast power to advantage. The recent fall in coffee prices gives an example, when we see prices paid to local producers decline far more dramatically than those paid to international coffee traders. Again, transnational agribusiness may sell cereals at prices below those on local markets thanks to generous price supports given by the United States and the European Union to their large farmers, who gain access to poorer markets thanks to liberal trading agreements. True, world commercial accords do make possible increased Asian, African and Latin American exports to richer countries, but the farms that supply this demand are almost always on a scale that has little to do with most poor families in these regions.

For land reform to be successful: (1) governments must have the capacity to provide family-scale farms secure titles, adequate credit and technical know-how; (2) governments must promote the market strength of small farmers internationally as well as locally; (3) governments must accommodate the long-term technological displacement of much rural employment by stemming population growth and finding new kinds of jobs for those on the land, and (4) international agribusiness must lose its subsidies, so that unfair competitive practices are ended while its controls over prices along the chain of production are better regulated. We may hope for effective governments able to achieve these ambitions, but it is only reasonable to suspect that the hundreds of millions of landless workers who hope desperately for help through land reform are likely to meet with disappointment and despair.