The Bank says their model is not a substitute to laws enabling governments to expropriate land. Expropriation has been an important instrument of breaking large landlord resistance to land reform. Market-assisted reforms involve granting loans and credits to the landless to buy land at market rates from wealthy landowners and to acquire fertilizers and technical assistance for new, marketable crops. They are often viewed as an instrument of rewarding landlords rather than for improving the livelihoods of the landless poor. Food First says market-assisted reforms are bound to fail because they place a heavy burden on poor people to repay expensive loans, often from harvests from poor soils.
Landowners often choose to sell the most marginal and ecologically fragile plots that they own.
Some of the concerns around market-assisted land reform are that privatizing communal lands increases individual competition. Profit-driven land use often leads to the introduction of new exotic crops, often more in demand abroad. Landless people and their struggles have gained world attention. In Zimbabwe, so-called veterans of the liberation war are currently confronting white commercial farmers who control the vast majority of prime land in the country, as the government looks the other way. In Brazil, landless workers occupy idle lands and take advantage of a clause in the constitution to legalize their claims.