Asia is full of such examples'<sup>2</sup> , as also that on Latin America countries.'<sup>3</sup> In many Latin American settings, the landowner-politician nexus has been successful in resisting reforms or in initiating counter-reforms, and thereby defending their status.

# **_Reducing inequalities through land reform and non-crop sources of income:_**

Much can be done to mitigate socio-political inequalities in rural areas, through land reform and diversification into non-crop sources of income - opening up the possibility of effective collective action within a community. This can have enormous indirect impact on growth and poverty alleviation, far greater than the direct equity and efficiency gains of land reform on which studies of land reform are typically focused, and for which the empirical evidence is somewhat mixed.1<sup>4</sup> Discussing the impact of land reform in South Korea, Whang (1 981: 97-98) argues that the gains of land reform were strictly sociopolitical: (Land reform) helped to miniaturize farm size ... and in so doing helped the delay of agricultural modernization in terms of productivity and mechanization.... (But it) promoted egalitarianism in rural communities.. .and thus facilitated the disappearance of class-consciousness between landlords and tenants.... Thus, the land reform provided the social and psychological precondition necessary for co-operation among framers and that m turn prepared the way for the rural innovation that was later ignited by the _Saemaul Undong._ Making social relations within the community more egalitarian was an essential precondition to the imaginative creation of state-community synergies in South Korea, Taiwan, and China, as discussed below. Land reforms facilitated the growth of horizontal developmental associations within South Korean and Taiwanese communities, as well as in China when it opened up to a market economy. As mentioned above, Whang (1981) emphasizes that the potential for South Korea's rapid rural development was generated by 12 See references in the two precedmg footnotes.

**'3** See for example Deere and Leon 1997; Hall 1994; Kay and Silva 1992; Prosterman et al. 1996; Tannenbaum 1962; and Thiesenhusen 1995b.

14 Some studies have found strong evidence of productivity gams associated with giving sharecroppers and small farmers more secure rights over the land they cultivate. This was found **mn** analyses of data from Tunisia (Laffont and Matoussi 1995), Ghana (Besley 1995) and China (Lin 1992). In West Bengal state of India, increasing tenants' rights was associated with 17-18% average productivity gains (Banerjee and others 2001). In another study m India, Binswanger and others (1993) concluded that small farms are more productive in settngs with little mechanization and slow technical change. Other studies, however, have found inconclusive evidence of productivity gams (Besley and Burgess 1998).

In some settings land reform has been carried out carefully enough to be effective in promoting equity and reducing poverty. Elsewhere, landowning elites have been successful in resisting it through active links with political elites and other evasion tactics. Examples include the counter-reforms initiated in several Latin American countries (Kay and Silva 1992, Thiesenhusen 1995a,b). Even where land has actually been redistributed, it can benefit mostly the upper echelons of the rural poor, increasing the gap between them and the poorest - as in the Philippines (Hayanii, Quisumbing and Lourdes 1990) and in some Latin American countries (Thiesenhusen 1995a,b).

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