The World Bank's Market-Assisted Land Reform: Obstacle to Rural Justice

Ironically, it is the World Bank that has put agrarian reform back on the international agenda since the mid-1990s. This development warrants suspicion because it is obviously related to major changes in the global political and economic context. Now the Cold War is over and China has taken the capitalist path, the Bank thinks it can easily take advantage of the popularity of land reform among the world’s poor and launch its own land reform ideology without objections. Unsurprisingly, it has stripped the concept of land reform from any reference to actual state-led land distribution and replaced it with its own brand of “market-assisted land reform.”