resources and marketing can all help greatiy in helping the poor diversify and increase their sources of income.<sup>17</sup> Help is required with obtaining credit, finding the appropriate inputs, acquiring know-how about production and marketing, ensuring quality control, and reaching wider markets.

There is a great deal of evidence that non-crop incomes alleviate poverty in developing countries while contributing to growth.'<sup>8</sup> Since income shocks in the agrarian and non-agrarian sectors are often uncorrelated, non-crop incomes also reduce dependence on patrons for help with tiding over income shocks. Expanding the potential for non-crop incomes is also politically far less challenging than land reform or tenancy reform.

# _Broader ramificationsfor the community and polity_

In a multiplicity of ways, land reform and non-crop opportunities help reduce the potential for local elite "capture", and enable greater mobility in a community as a whole. The most important gain of reducing local power imbalances is that they lay the basis for a more inclusionary and developmental polity. This has been extensively argued in studies of India. Dreze and Sen (1996) have pointed out that the potential for "capture" by local elites is far higher in regions of India still characterized by deep socio-political inequalities than in more egalitarian regions.1<sup>9</sup> Banerjee and Iyer (2002) have shown that these inequalities are associated with poorer economic and social development outcomes, in terms of agricultural productivity, health and education.

Even if the poorest do not benefit directly from the new opportunities, they can benefit enormously indirectly from the social churning generated in the community. The newly-mobile beneficiaries may raise wage rates and hire more labour (Appendix 1), and they take on more remunerative opportunities and free up niches for the landless. They may benefit everyone by seeking greater accountability in the use of local development funds and lobby to ensure that the community receives better public services. The community as a whole is better placed to provide the peer-evaluation and peer-monitoring required for key facilities such as credit co-operatives.

Even relatively meager levels of redistribution can produce powerful and longlasting changes. Studies of the Southern United States show that despite the very limited and truncated efforts at giving land to Blacks during the 1870s: ... well into the twentieth century, blacks who did acquire land were more likely to register, vote and run for office than other members of the rural community (Foner 1989: 109, cited in Herring 1999).

> 17 This has been successful in many contexts. Through a creative model of dairy co-operatives, the National Dairy Project in India has helped to significantly raise rural household incomes, including those of the landless, marginal and small farmers . See Candler and Kumar (1998) and Sampark (1997).

> 8 This is shown in many studies in Asia and Africa. See, for example, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (1995), Newman and Canagarajah (2000); and Eder (1993).

> 19 Harriss (1999) argues that the regions of India in which traditional agrarian power structures have been changed show better development outcomes.

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