It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of land as an asset for the poor in today’s structurally adjusted, economically liberalised and globalised world. Trying to understand the many dynamics at play in today's complex post-Cold War world is not easy. As someone who since 1997 has tried to support Oxfam International staff, partners and allies engaged in land issues principally, but not exclusively, in Africa, I feel this problem acutely. What is really happening in the contexts in which we are seeking to intervene, and what are the critical links between the local, national, regional and global levels? There are never easy answers to these questions, but it is important to continue to ask them.

At the level of ideas, I find quite helpful some of the debates which have appeared in the pages of the Journal of Agrarian Change. But they do make for rather gloomy reading. In one of his many contributions, Henry Bernstein (2002, 2003, 2004) ponders pessimistically about the prospects for significant future redistributive land reform targeted at the poor. He argues that the long wave of land reform across the world beginning with the French Revolution came to an end in the 1970s, coinciding with the emergence of the phenomenon we now refer to as globalisation. The back of feudal landlordism was broken in many parts of the world, allowing the development of both industrialisation and more productive agriculture, based on capitalist relations. Industrial urbanisation took people off the land and provided new and expanding markets. But now, Bernstein argues, we live in a globalised world characterised by the search for ever cheaper and more exploitable labour.

The existence of cheap labour export processing zones (EPZs), which many governments seem proud to boast of, is an illustration of this. In the infamous maquila factories of Central America or in the clothing sweat shops of East Asia, we seem to be in a world in which human and labour rights are being put into reverse gear. The lack of bargaining power of poor people in today's global supply chains has led some NGOs to characterise this as ‘the race to the bottom’. We are all aware of the growing gap between rich and poor and the intensification of inequality in many parts of the world.

Africa's recent economic history has been almost uniformly dismal. Structural adjustment may well have been necessary to attack the bloated and unproductive bureaucracies and parastatals in many countries, but the social impact of the medicines applied has been harsh in the extreme. Zambia is one of many countries to have suffered truly radical economic decline. As someone who lived in Zambia in the 1970s and witnessed with my own eyes the rapid formation of a new urban middle class as Zambians abandoned the land in their tens of thousands for new economic opportunities in the cities, it has been deeply disturbing to return in subsequent decades to observe the rapid and demonstrable decline in people's hopes, expectations and lifestyles.

In Zambia, as in much of Africa, the huge loss of regular urban jobs has made it far harder for people to engage in economic reciprocity with rural kinfolk. Scholars such as Deborah Bryceson have written of 'de-agrarianisation' or 'de-peasantisation', to describe a process in which people adopt what in the jargon is now called ‘diversified livelihoods strategies’ in an increasingly desperate attempt to survive. In such a context, intensified by population increase and related pressure on resources, access to land as a key asset for survival has become much more important, in ways that would have seemed highly unlikely in Zambia back in the mid-1970s. As a result, conflicts over land have intensified across the continent.

The purpose of this brief, crude global sketch is to make the point that struggles over land will take different forms in different parts of the world depending on a range of important variables such as levels of economic development, political awareness and mobilisation, degrees of urbanisation and literacy, levels of education and technology, and the agricultural potential of soils - a critical factor in Africa, as Archie Mafeje (2003) has pointed out recently. In short, the local context is all important.

In South Africa the ANC Government has clearly judged (perhaps correctly) that it can afford to delay meaningful land reform because it fears no danger of peasant revolts in the foreseeable future. In countries such as Uganda and Kenya, small pressure groups including land alliances have little serious political constituency and bear no resemblance to the great Brazilian mass movement of the landless, the MST (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra). Decades of political conflict culminated in the 1988 Constitution, which proclaimed that land in Brazil must perform a 'social function'. In other words (and this has particular resonance for the Zambian Copperbelt) that it is not politically acceptable for vast tracts of land to lie idle in the legal hands of absentee landlords, neither producing anything nor providing jobs.

Elsewhere, for example in Guatemala and Honduras, class configurations are very different and the local equivalents of the MST struggle against the outright and often violent hostility of the big landlords (and vigilantes) and their urban allies. Here the issue is further complicated by ethnicity - by the palpable hostility directed towards the indigenous people of Central America; in Honduras there is a 'popular' saying 'better be dead than have indigenous people living on my land'.

In this part of the world land activists need to be both extremely courageous and members of organised trade union or political movements. Put crudely, in parts of Central and South America such people routinely get killed for their beliefs. This does not happen in Africa. This is a fundamental difference, reflecting contrasting historical conditions. (Of course, people do regularly get killed in local level conflicts over land in Africa and this seems likely to increase as conflicts intensify over resources more generally.)

A persistent theme in much of the land advocacy work in which I and many others have been involved is that of lack of information, particularly on the part of the politically powerless. This is a state of affairs which governments in general and ministries of land in particular are often keen to perpetuate in their own interests. Extracting information from them can often be extremely difficult, though donor demands for transparency can be helpful here.

A very imaginative land campaign (Campanha Terra) in Mozambique sought to address this by translating key aspects of a potentially progressive new land law into local languages, and by using imaginative media such as comics, audio cassettes, theatre, music and posters to help raise people's awareness of their new rights. This was particularly important in a country such as Mozambique, with its high levels of illiteracy, and where the law imaginatively and unusually acknowledged peoples' historical rights to land as communities, on the basis of acknowledged occupation rather than formal written records. (Palmer 2003, Hanlon 2002).

Awareness of one's rights is nowhere more important than in the area of women's land rights. These too vary greatly across the world depending on factors such as the legal context (which is surprisingly gender progressive in Latin America) and levels of political awareness and organisation. Even between neighbouring countries realities can be very different, with women enjoying greater legal rights in Columbia and Nicaragua than in Honduras and Mexico because of greater mobilisation by and unity within women's groups.

But in Africa women face particular obstacles, often being regarded legally as minors and generally enjoying only secondary rights through their husbands, if married. Such rights are frequently ill-defined, of uncertain duration and subject to change and to maintaining good relations with others. Women often need to be married - and may remain in oppressive relationships - in order to enjoy access to or rights in land. Patriarchy remains dominant at all levels, while patrilineal traditions, combined with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, make women particularly vulnerable to loss of assets, including land, on the death of her spouse. Widows are frequently chased away by their late husband's relations and there are increasing harrowing individual tales of destitution as a result. In such a context the work of legal aid and information groups such as the women lawyers' association, FIDA, in Kenya and Uganda and the Women's Legal Centre in South Africa is particularly important.

Despite strenuous efforts by women lobbyists, including the Uganda Land Alliance, concrete gains by women have been few and far between. Awareness and support work are absolutely critical. Changing laws is important, but changing social norms is even more so (FAO/Oxfam GB 2003). Information is indeed power, but Latin American experience suggests that there is no substitute for political struggle in the fiercely contested arena of women's land rights - as elsewhere.

Land is always a deeply political issue, involving highly disputed and often very dangerous terrain, as events in Zimbabwe have illustrated all too graphically. Working on land requires adopting very long term horizons and sticking with things through thick and thin, for these are long term processes which defy quick fixes or easy final solutions. Donors, generally speaking, are unable to adopt such long-term horizons. Fashions come and go in the notoriously fickle development world, as they do in the academic world.

Contexts do differ greatly, but it is clear that the clumsy imposition of liberalisation, the rolling back of the role of the state and of the state marketing boards, grain reserves and the like, combined with manifestly unfair international trade rules, have left many poor people far more vulnerable than they were and far more dependent on access to land than ever before, while that very access is increasingly threatened in a globalising world.

In such a context, struggles for land rights continue to form a vital part of the wider fight for global justice. It is my very strong belief that continued support should be lent to support and sustain people and organisations who are engaging in fighting for land and justice for the poor. The fact that poor people are struggling against increasingly long odds in a hugely hostile global climate makes this more necessary than it has ever been. So the historic Frelimo slogan from Mozambique remains as valid today as it was back in the heady days of the Front Line States - A luta continua!

* Robin Palmer is Global Land Policy Adviser with Oxfam GB. This is a slightly shortened version of a paper presented to an Oxfam Zambia workshop on the Copperbelt in March 2004. Click on the link below for references.

* Please send comments to