a landrights campaign for Britain
The Land Is Ours
a landrights campaign for Britain
LAND ESSAYS Volume 1
We will publish anything which offers a fresh and provocative perspective on land and landrights, regardless of its provenance. Two of the essays here were first carried by the Guardian; the others are hitherto unpublished.
| CONTENTS Click on any row of trees to return here... |
 Zoning out the Peasants.
by Simon Fairlie: Smallholdings are actively discouraged in Britain by a planning system that favours the rich above the poor. Sustainable development requires new planning laws.
Monopoly without Part Two.
by Alan Laurie: Britain's landowners are continually enriched at our expense. We need a community ground rent to reclaim the costs they impose on society.
The Travails of an Anarchist Builder.
by Brian Richardson: How to get round an authoritarian, market-controlled planning system and build as common sense dictates.
Get off my Planet!
by George Monbiot: We can't hope for a classless society while most people are excluded from most of the nation. A right to roam is one of the pre-requisites of citizenship.
Where Distribution is only Half the Solution.
by Leah Gordon: Despite a reasonably equitable division of land, Haiti's peasants are still struggling with hunger and insecurity.
References
:First installment of a bibliography for landrights activists.
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Zoning out the Peasants: Simon Fairlie
One might be forgiven for assuming that, in a democratic Britain, every farmer - big or small, peasant or patrician - had an equal right to build a chicken house. Not so. The right to put up any agricultural building is a question of wealth; it is unconditionally available only to those who own 12 acres or more, a sizeable holding by the standards of most European countries.
A similar hurdle stands in the way of those who may have, say, 15 or 30 acres, and who, like any farmer, want to live on their property. To obtain permission to move onto their holding, be it in a newly built house, a converted out-building, a caravan or a tent, they must first prove that, by the standards of the Ministry of Agriculture, they are 'viable' - three acres and a cow is not enough, nowadays you need over 50 dairy cows or 160 beef cattle. For many smallholders, accustomed to, or intent upon living partly off their own produce, this level of production is as unnecessary as it is unattainable.
Do we really need to shepherd all but an elite into suburban estates so that they may amble round a spotlessly managed country park on Sundays?
These obstacles, a familiar source of frustration to every small-scale farmer, are part of a national planning policy which could hardly have been better designed to prevent peasant farming from working efficiently in Britain. The policy of 'zoning', which divides rural land into two distinct zones, agricultural and development, was introduced with another more laudable aim in mind, that of stemming urban sprawl - and it has been fairly successful at doing so. Most people are grateful for green belts - agricultural land where building is restricted. But this success has been achieved by discriminating against the poor in general, and the small farmer in particular.
When planning permission, as we know it, was introduced in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, it was recognised that land which retained full development rights acquired a scarcity value, known as 'betterment'. The then Labour government therefore imposed a 'Development Charge' on developers of 100 per cent of this betterment. This was removed by the Conservatives in 1954. In 1967, Labour put it back on again, though at a lower rate, claiming that 'it is wrong that planning decisions about land should so often result in the realising of unearned increment by the owners of land to which they apply' - but the Tories removed it again in 1971, this time for good.
The unearned and relatively undertaxed income from betterment is now of staggering proportions. Agricultural land is worth about £1500 per acre while the price of development land - which was all once agricultural land - is 50 or even 100 times as much; this stupendous rise accounts for a large proportion of the increase in housing prices.
Who pays for this unearned increment? You do, if you're paying rent or a mortgage. And who benefits? Owners who have seen the value of their property inflate; but more specifically , developers and speculators who successfully transfer land from the agricultural to the development sector, and the banks, building societies and estate agents who have a stake in the process.
The result has been that low income people in rural areas have been squeezed out of the market, while their homes have been bought up by urban incomers, often with money acquired directly or indirectly through betterment. For the would-be small farmer, however, the effects of betterment are doubly galling. Retiring farmers can make more by sell ing their farmhouse to a wealthy non-agricultural buyer and disposing of the fields separately. The prospective smallholder can therefore acquire land cheaply enough, but it often left without accommodation. Since planning permission for a dwelling is unlikely, our smallholder faces the prospect of renting or buying a house 'within the development zone' that he or she doesn't really want.
Furthermore, since the price of housing and industrial land is high, while that of agricultural land is low, farm produce commands a weak price on the market compared to housing and manufactured goods. So our reluctantly non-residential peasant produces goods in the low-price, agricultural zone, but has to pay for accommodation and other attendant commodities in the high-price development zone. It takes an awful lot of organic cabbages or free range eggs to pay off £100 a week rent.
The policy of zoning might, perhaps, have seemed reasonable in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was deemed vital to increase Britain's agricultural output and there were jobs galore in the towns. But in the 1990s, it is beginning to resemble a system of social apartheid, where the protected countryside is progressively given over to the combine harvester and the Range Rover, while rural self-sufficiency is discouraged and the poor are gradually herded into 'social housing' on the edge of subu rbanescent villages. The paradox of agro-industrial efficiency is that it is socially inefficient, and hence self-defeating. Today, with millions unemployed, with large tracts of agricultural land being 'set aside' and with a recognisable move away from the city, a planning system which zones smallholders out of existence is looking decidedly off-target.
The prospect of a vigorous peasantry farming surplus land and providing - as in France or Switzerland - high quality local produce for a discerning market, is starting to appear less like an 'inefficient mess' and more like a sensible solution to some pressing problems. As the policy of zoning comes under scrutiny in the next few years, so there will be questions raised about the pessimistic assumptions which lie behind it; is all human development intrinsically harmful to the environment? Is it utterly impossible to establish standards whereby people can live, work and build in the countryside without degrading it? Do we really need to shepherd all but an elite into suburban estates and sunrise industries so that they may amble round a spotlessly managed country park on Sundays?
The answer to these questions is, of course, 'no'. Recently, permission was given for a group of underground houses to be built on greenbelt land in Nottinghamshire. The project involves the planting of over 3,000 trees and the establ ishment of a fish-farming pond and small-scale food-production - and, one may imagine, a chicken-house. David Pickels, the chief architect of Newark and Sherwood Council, stated that the project 'broke all the planning rules' but would create a 'fine' landscape. It is in this spirit that new canons for rural planning policy will be forged - for the betterment of the rural economy as a whole, rather than for a privileged few.
Monopoly without Part Two: Alan Laurie
Herein lies one of the chief problems of housing and homelessness, and there are dangerous consequences for the whole economy. Housing associations are hamstrung by the cost of building land. During the recent boom it was sites more than bricks and mortar that rose in value and sites whose value subsequently fell. The wish to have a rise in house prices to fortify the recovery from recession is also a wish by landlords to get a better return on their ownership of sites. What is called 'a recovery in the housing market' is to a considerable degree a rise in the value of housing sites. That means people are having to pay more for the right to live somewhere rather than for anything substantial. Apart from the hardship brought by increased rents and mortgages it is bad for the economy that money should change hands for something that is neither goods nor services.
There are also planning problems. In Ludlow at the present time sensible planning is skewed and bedevilled because the District Council has to recover the cost of the large town centre site it has acquired. The landowner must be paid. That is the imperative, whatever the citizens wish or the Minister for the Environment directs.
Privatisation has thrown the spotlight on the question of what is rightly private and what public. Access to the countryside is one aspect of this. Ever since the enclosures of the 16th century there has been a decline in an Englishman's right to walk on English land. He has fought for it but cannot walk on it. The Criminal Justice Act brought protest because it s truck many people as unfair. Very like the reaction to the Poll Tax, the gut feeling was 'NO'.
The two things are linked: one enables landowners to exclude people from their land and the other sought to tax the landless while rewarding at the same time the landed. (A record number of the latter turned up to vote for the poll tax in the House of Lords.)
To enshrine in law a person's title to land is one thing, (whether that land be farm, moorland, house site, shop site, factory site, railway line, bus station, car park, water company, school or whatever) but it is quite another thing that the holders of those titles should have the right to appropriate what they have not earned. The legal title to use the land is just; what is unjust is the pocketing of the unimproved value of a piece of Mother Earth.
Governments through history have taxed alcohol, beards, newspapers, horses, wigs, togas, doors, funerals, fireplaces, windows, salt, tea, servants and wheels to name but a few. However the earliest taxes were on the produce of the land, a fifth or a tenth, (a tithe). The English rating system began as such a tax in Queen Elizabeth I's day. A poor rate was collected from landowners in proportion to the acreage and the productivity of their land.
Since the Great Rebellion and the rise of Parliamentary power in the 17th century the landowners have made t he taxes on land less and less. Taxes on other things have grown more and more. Taxes on income came on the scene in Victoria's reign. The present government favours indirect taxation on things we consume. The landowner has done well out of the Criminal Justice Act: he has done even better by protecting the unearned income from his land, sometimes called economic rent.
The landowner has done well out of the Criminal Justice Act: he has done even better by protecting the unearned income from his land
What is more the economic rent tends to rise as population and production increase. As Thorold Rogers writes, "Every permanent improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every bettering of the general condition of society, every facility given for production, every stimulus supplied to consumption, raises rent. The landowner sleeps but thrives. He alone, among the recipients in the distribution of products, owes everything to the labour of others, contributes nothing of his own."
The Rowntree Report demonstrates the divide between rich and poor but we need to understand and to address the underlying problem that runs through history, namely the great divide between the landed and the landless. It would be astonishing if no country had attempted to collect as public revenue this unearned portion of land value in recent times. Many have with success. In Britain, however, attempts have been thwarted either by the chance of war or the implacable opposition of, guess who? The landowning lobby. It has been just as aggressive and successful in protecting its rights in urban England as it has in the countryside.
The Finance Act of 1909-10 made provision for the valuation of all land. The intention was to collect as national revenue the economic rent. The reasoning was that it was earned by the community in general and should in justice be applied to the community and not to the lucky title-holder. So ferocious was the landowners' reaction in the House of Lords that the King had to threaten to ennoble enough peers to see it through. War came. The valuation was stopped, duties repealed and landowners refunded.
The Finance Bill of 1931 proposed a national tax of 1 penny in the pound of unimproved land value. It became law in July of that year. The National Government came to power and repealed every part of it and the Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, earned from some the title of 'traitor' for giving in to the landowners' demands. He wrote in explanation at the time: "...it may be argued that the step which has been taken indicates the power of certain interests."
In 1939 Herbert Morrison proposed to adjust the London County Council's rating system and base it on site values only. His Bill passed through its House of Commons Readings but was overtaken by war. In 1947 the Labour Government attempted to approach the question in another way. The work of Lloyd George's land register having been destroyed, it was proposed in the Town and Country Planning Act that a levy from the land value be collected whenever a land transaction took place. It proved unworkable and was repealed.
The history of the game Monopoly provides a parable about the failure to understand the difference between land and capital. In 1904 the game of Monopoly in essence was invented. The rules, however, were in two parts. Part One was a game of cut-throat capitalism, winner takes all, losers to the poorhouse, every bit of land privatised. In Part Two, before poverty has overtaken the players, there is a change of rules. A proportion of rent, namely that earned on the unimproved sites, went to the national treasury. As the rules say: "Unemployment and poverty is abolished for ever."
I wonder how far Monopoly without Part Two has twisted our sense of what is private and what is public about land. When a water company acquires thousands of acres of land they are gone from the people of England for ever and the rent has been lost to the public purse for ever. I am not surprised there is a gut feeling among many Labour supporters that changing Clause 4 is changing something basic. Where does private ownership end? How do we protect public ownership?
Is it a mystery or is it a conspiracy that the question of land ownership in Brazil or Peru is a burning subject but in Britain it is considered of minor importance? Adam Smith is quoted on many subjects to justify the New Right. He also wrote: "Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed on them." Tom Paine put the matter succinctly: "Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
The Travails of an Anarchist Builder: Brian Richardson
To the land question: of all our problems it is the most intractable. The maldistribution of land is still not reformed, nor is there any prospect of it. Yet to me the land is literally the bedrock on which our lives are founded. Where we live, the food we eat, the space we inhabit, the things we create, all depend on the land, and if we are to control our lives we need to have control of the land. But we have almost completely lost it.
It happens that I am privileged to have been brought up in an owner-occupied family house standing on freehold land. Living in such favoured circumstances has bred in me a sense of security and belonging-to-place that is a firm building block in my sense of identity. It has led to my becoming a self-builder. I am one of those many people who respond to Christopher Alexander's words "Whoever you are, you may have a dream of one day building a most beautiful house for your family, a garden, a fountain, a fish pond, a big room wi th soft light, flowers outside and the smell of new grass".
I had the further good fortune to be given a share of this family asset - a part of the land by the house that enabled me to build my own home on it. (This was in the days when it was possible by dint of much persuasive effort to convince the planning committee to give assent - now everything is 'plan-led'; but more of that later).
The two related family dwellings together occupy a site of about ¾ of an acre. Our gardens provide us with a beautiful setting and a significant amount of food (probably more than if the land were conventionally farmed - as Sir Frederick Osborn so usefully pointed out). I do not feel uneasy about this happy arrangement, I just wish more people found themselves equally well favoured - they could be. The space might seem generous in this 'crowded little island' but the statistical facts are reassuring. Our head count roughly equates with the number of acres in the British Isles at around 56 million. Evenly distributed - an acre each (or a hectare for every average 2.4 family!) Bearing in mind that not everyone wants to live in the country (many, incomprehensibly to me, prefer to occupy a tiny apartment in the city) it seems to me that to aspire to 'own' for one's lifetime a plot of 3/8 of an acre is reasonable. Even if everybody did it, in sheer statistical terms i t would leave 35 million acres for farming, commons, highways, cities and industry. Theoretically, generous.
As it is, the position is gravely distorted by the fact that a mere 1,700 individuals own about a 1/3 of Britain and most of the rest is owned by wealthy and powerful institutions. The majority of us, say 80% of the population, have to share the 8% or so of the land left to us. It can immediately be seen that there aren't enough 3/8 acre holdings left to go around even for those of us who do not want to be penned into cities, and the shortfall is reflected in the absurdly high market value of housing land.
The situation is further worsened by the current system of planning control that, by withholding permission for building houses 'in the open countryside', exacerbates the scarcity. In very nearly all circumstances the only land on which the mandatory local plan will allow you to build is within the boundaries of so-called 'settlements'. Only minute areas of these are already unbuilt on and the market price soars ever higher.
There is a tiny chink in the planners' rampart of prohibitions that is worth describing because, although not actively concealed, it is not widely known.
Even if you succeed in getting a piece of developable land you are still faced with the appalling restrictions of planning control. Demented planning officers, imbued wi th public spirit in their role as arbiters of architectural taste, will attempt to impose their own idea of what is locally acceptable. As if the locals didn't know their own minds about whether your proposals offend them, and as an anarchist you will of course have consulted them direct. People remote from their locality (as the planners are most likely to be) have no business in what goes on. But their word is law. Appeal against a decision made by a local government officer with 'delegated powers' can be made 'upwards' to the Minister of State but this takes time and money and may still result in refusal if the nationally imposed planning guidelines have been transgressed.
Even if you have found a building site and the planning officer is a rare sympathetic soul who will allow you to do what you want, you still have to conform to Building Regulations! This is not necessarily bad, as although they too are nationally imposed, they are on the whole rationally and sensibly based. They are administered by Building Inspectors who, unlike planners, are usually experienced in practical building matters and can be genuinely helpful. But many of their rules will be irrelevant as they are to the book's standard, not your standard.
The American self-builder Ken Kern exhorts us to 'build according to your own best judgement, and assume responsibility for your own build ing construction'. It may be that you find planning guidelines and regulation standards helpful - if so use them, but do not rely on them. Build to the standards you want, which may be much higher. Just because a construction conforms, it may not perform well for you. In America, Ken Kern can advocate building outside areas of building-code jurisdiction. We haven't any such places here, but we can take the mental step of assuming responsibility for what we do.
In this bleak landscape of unfreedom to occupy land and build in an anarchist way, is there a shaft of light anywhere? There is a tiny chink in the planners' rampart of prohibitions that is worth describing here because, although not actively concealed, it is not widely known about.
Colin Ward rightly, but so far vainly, calls for experimental planning-free zones where people can build according to their own best judgement. But there may already be what amounts to a planning-free zone around your own house. The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995 says what you can do without seeking approval from the authorities.
For a certain, limited category of people, there is the opportunity to build freely something really useful. To be in this category you have already to possess a dwelling house standing on a fairly generous site. Permitted development is 'the provision wit hin the curtilage of a dwelling-house of any building.....required for a purpose incidental to the enjoyment of the dwelling-house as such'. There follow a number of paragraphs setting out the limits. There are several of them and they need careful study before you know you are clear of control, but judge adroitly between them and you may be surprised at what can be achieved. I have done it on several occasions, and when people ask me 'What do the planners think of all this?', they are astonished when I tell them that they are powerless to intervene.
The Bible, I recollect, tells us 'Unto whom that hath shall be given' - a prophecy once more fulfilled in this planning edict. You have to start with a dwelling-house. The curtilage, the land immediately around the dwelling-house, is not precisely defined but is generally construed as being the garden plot or yard. The purpose - incidental to the enjoyment of the dwelling house as such - is all-important. It cannot be a non-domestic purpose (such as an industrial workshop) nor can it be the setting up of an additional separate family home. I have successfully interpreted it variously as a home workshop, a studio, a summerhouse, a guest bedroom, extra living space for a member of the family and a motorcycle garage. The stipulation is that it must be 'for the domestic needs or personal enjoyment of the occupants of t he dwelling-house.'
There are strict physical limits. 'No part of the new building can be nearer to any highway that bounds the curtilage than the part of the original dwelling-house nearest to that highway or 20 metres from the highway, whichever is nearer'. It must be at least 5 metres away from the dwelling-house - i.e. not an adjoining extension (there are other rules permitting small extensions that I won't go into here). The height measured to the ridge of the roof must not exceed 4 metres or 3 metres to a flat roof. Finally, and rather amazingly, it must not exceed 50% of the total area of curtilage (excluding the ground area of the original dwelling house). If you have a decent-sized garden, this can represent a potentially enormous building!
There is a cruel planning zone limit which may catch you out - 'article 1 (5)' land is excluded. That is any land that is in a designated 'area of outstanding natural beauty', a National Park, a conservation area or the curtilage of a listed building. You also have to study your planning permission document if your house is recently built to see if these rights to permitted development have been waived. Disappointing, but that still leaves a lot of places where serious building can be done without any reference to the authoritarian planners at all. Building Regulations may still apply. They are quite separately administered from planning. Any building over 30 square metres of floor area measured inside the external walls, or any building in which people sleep has to conform.
The way I build to get the roomiest space under the 4 metre ridge height is to use a low roof pitch, 10 degrees or so. This is too low for tiles or slates to work without leaking, so I make a timber roof deck, lay a waterproof membrane over it (loose, so it does not fracture when the deck moves) and to keep it from blowing away ballast it with grass sods. An earth thickness of 3'' or 4'' (wet and with 3 feet of snow on it) does not impose a greater load than is borne by a domestic floor, so the necessary structure, though sturdy, is not extravagant. It grows a beautiful green covering most of the year, with a blond hay crop in the hot summer to reflect the heat of the sun. Wild flowers thrive, the air is freshened. The house is made effectively larger, without making the garden smaller, it is just displaced a few feet upwards. The sod roof has a lot to recommend it - (but that is a hobby-horse to flog on another occasion.....)
I don't know of anyone who has done it yet, but a possible route to a self-built home may be to buy, at a reasonable price, a really poky, dilapidated cottage that would make an inadequate dwelling but has a decent garden. Then you could build, as permitted development, a c abin amounting to a starter-home behind it and progress gradually to rehabilitating the original house to expand into as and when you could afford it.
So my utopian dream, echoing William Morris' vision of an Arcadian Britain with the garden-like countryside re-populated, is shrunk to this pitiful, tiny crevice in the cliff of the authoritarian, market-controlled regime we cling onto. But if you get the opportunity, go for it. It is a lot of fun to build free, even on this scale.
Get off my Planet!: George Monbiot
At first he looked lost, and stood in puzzled silence beside his road cones and stripy tape. Then his brow cleared. "Last year," he told me, "there was human excrement left in the field."
This year the police force's revelry at Stonehenge was facilitated by provisions of the new Criminal Justice Act. They didn't make a lot of difference, as the police were using these powers at Stonehenge even before they existed. The official reason for this six-figure show of force is not the lack of a Portaloo, but the damage the visitors would do to the monument if they were allowed in. Hippies' feet, of course, are rougher than those of the worshippers who have used the site sporadically for the last 4000 years, and would rapidly grind the stones into dust.
Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, the Ministry of Defence has recently completed its renovation of another scheduled ancient monument: a unique and archaeologically famous Bronze Age boundary ditch, which, despite years of pleas and warnings, it filled in to make a tank track. It can add this victorious manoeuvre to an impressive tally of enemy installations it has damaged or destroyed on Salisbury Plain, including longbarrows, roundbarrows, tracks and dykes. As on previous occasions, the ministry has been politely asked not to do it again.
The high jinks at the stones illustrate an absurdity that prevails all over B ritain. Not only at Stonehenge, but in almost every corner of the countryside, we are shut out of the land which once was ours. The reasons for our exclusion, while appearing robust from a distance, behave rather as the stones are said to do. They crumble as one approaches them.
As the ethics of enclosure spread further, now penetrating cities as well as the countryside, increasing numbers will find that they are trespassing on the planet
Whenever I am caught trespassing on a large estate I am told I'm intruding on the owner's privacy. It is of little account that the owner may live in a wholly different part of the country or that I may never come within sight of his house. By crossing the boundaries of his land, the gamekeepers tell me, I may as well have stepped into his living room.
This hyperbole exposes the weakness of the argument. Our homes and their immediate surroundings are, of course, our private domains, and most of us are content with that. Why a large landowner's need for privacy is so much more pressing than ours that it should extend to a substantial proportion of Britain has yet to be adequately explained.
Visitors to the countryside, we are told, damage landscape features and destroy wildlife. Well, the ramblers have obviously been hard at work, for huge swathes of countryside have, in the last few decades, lost all their hedgerows, ancient woodlands, downland, watermeadows, heathland and archaeological remains. In many places there is hardly a feature remaining to arrest the eye. It is, in reality, because we are excluded - not only from the land itself but also from the decision-making processes affecting it - that landowners have been able to make a clean sweep of the countryside, replacing our history and sense of belonging with what some have proudly described as a factory floor.
There are places, like Derwentwater and Dovedale, where the pressure of numbers does damage the land, and there are others where the fauna or flora is so vulnerable that it can tolerate no intrusion, but these conditions are rare and localized. They fail to justify our exclusion from the rest of Britain. Some visitors to the countryside do, as landowners claim, damage hedges or frighten livestock, but restricting these activities (and there are plenty of laws with which to do so) does not necessitate excluding the harmless majority. We don't ban everyone from using the pavements because a minority of passers-by spray graffiti or break shop windows.
The gamekeeper's penultimate resort (the last is always that he's bigger than me and legally empowered to throw me off ) is that we have an adequate network of footpaths, from which there's no need to stray. Regrettably, many of the most charming and intricate c orners of Britain are wholly inaccessible by public footpath. Indeed it seems that while some landowners have allowed us to walk across places they have destroyed, they have largely succeeded in keeping us out of the places they have chosen to preserve.
Even this inadequate network is under attack, as, after years of obstruction by means of fences or ploughing, footpaths are extinguished on the grounds that no one uses them any more. Perhaps more importantly, one visits the countryside to escape from the constraints of dedicated space, the narrow regimentation imposed by the pavement, the office or ten square metres of garden. Keeping to the footpath does little to relieve our sense of confinement.
As one examines the ethics of ownership, it becomes clear that excluding people from the land is not, as landlords suggest, a duty, but a privilege. In buying a swathe of Britain you buy the right to exclude other people from it. The exclusive use of land is perhaps the most manifest of class barriers. With physical exclusion, one obtains a guarantee of social removal from the common herd.
The rest of us are, quite literally, pushed to the margins of society. Having confined us, through centuries of enclosure, to the cities, most landlords now intend to keep us there. If we enter the countryside we must sneak round it like fugitives, outlaws in the nation in which we all once had a stake. As the ethics of enclosure, propelled by the Criminal Justice Act, spread further, now penetrating cities as well as the countryside, increasing numbers will find that they are trespassing on the planet.
It is, in truth, not we who are the trespassers but the landlords. They are trespassing against our right to enjoy the gifts that Nature bequeathed to all of us. We must challenge this intrusion by demanding a statutory right to roam, which would require the owner to produce a good reason for excluding us, rather than requiring us to produce a good reason for being there. In the meantime we should, like the people trying to enter Stonehenge, heed John Major's call for a classless society, by trespassing in the countryside as often and as comprehensively as possible.
Where Distribution is only Half the Solution: Leah Gordon
Almost everywhere in Haiti, the rich topsoil is gone. As the quality of the soil declines, more water and nutrient supplies are needed to maintain current levels of agricultural productivity. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 hectares of arable land per year are lost due to erosion. This is particularly alarming since it is estimated that only 28% of Haiti's total land area (2.7 million hectares) is arable, while 46% is currently being cultivated. One million hectares have already been eroded by agriculture.
Haiti's system of land tenure is unique in the Caribbean Basin and the former colonies of Central and Southern America. The predominant system of tenure is that of peasant-owned smallholdings. Haiti does not conform to the standard Latin American pattern of heavy concentrations of land in the hands of a minority of landowners who exploit the majority of peasants.
This uniqueness is due to the slaves' revolt which began in 1791 and culminated in independence from France in 1804. After the revolution, the new political leaders Toussaint, Dessalines and Christophe, former slaves who led the revolution, all attempted to keep the plantation system going with forced labour schemes called fermage. But there was massive resistance when they tri ed to institute their versions of militarised agriculture. Sidney Mintz, an anthropologist, regards the formation of the Haitian peasantry as a particular form of resistance, one in which 'an entire nation turned it's back on a system of large estates, worked by forced labour'.
Petion, the president of southern Haiti, followed a radically different agricultural policy. In 1809, he abandoned the forced labour system and decided to parcel up the land. The reasons behind this redistribution were both political and economic. Petion needed to maintain internal peace and to resettle army veterans. Also, it was increasingly difficult to obtain the capital or the labour needed for large-scale cultivation. Fears of French infiltration led to laws which severely limited foreign investment. The Imperial Constitution of 1805 forbade any white from owning land in Haiti.
Petion's much trumpeted 'agrarian reform' gave him much popularity with the peasants, even though, in truth, he had withheld the best land for himself and his mulatto supporters. However, by the 1820's none of the landowning generals truly believed that they could re-establish the large plantations. The restoration of slavery was unthinkable. The peasantry had made their minds up and clung to their garden plots and their control of the labour process. Liberty was forever associated with the possession of la nd.
Squatting was a simple matter, given the political conditions during the nineteenth century. Once the redistribution of land had begun, no administration proved strong enough to prevent the peasants from spreading across the territory. The plantations were abandoned and taken over by peasant squatters. They needed not only land but also wood for fuel and construction, and wood could be cut on anybody's land without sanctions.
Few peasants are in a position where they could present any titles to the land they claim as their own
The upper class groups, the generals, freed slaves and mulattos, who had gained much land after the revolution, slowly ceased to be able to extract a lot of money from their property. The defeat of the landlords was certainly not total, but most of them turned to foreign merchandising and government, with the main purpose of filling their pockets. Corruption was ubiquitous and the state was characterised by a never ending series of coups and counter-coups to conquer the treasury for more or less private purposes.
But the uniqueness of the original system has not really benefited the Haitian peasant. Most Haitian peasants have access to land which they regard as their own, but as a rule this land is not secured by any written deeds. In addition, due to population pressures, some peasants have to take land on lease against f ixed rents or against a share of the future crop. This makes it very easy to fall into debt if the crop fails in any year.
Even though land transactions should be carried out by deed, executed and authenticated by a notary for registration, few peasants are in a position where they could present any titles to the land they claim as their own. Legally, 20 years of uninterrupted possession without deeds theoretically establishes an undisputed right to the land in question. But in Haiti there is no political and legal framework within which property rights inland are completely protected. When outside interests claim peasant landholdings it is nearly always the peasant who loses the land.
During the Duvalier era, the Tontons Macoutes and local 'chef de section' system further eroded peasants' rights to the land. The Macoutes ruled on a local level and as they constituted the justice system, much land was taken in lieu of debts. In the Jean Rabel area to the north of Haiti, the state loaned large tracts of land to Duvalier supporters for approximately $1 per unit and then this land was rented to the peasants at $30 per unit. Most of the time the minimal rent was never paid to the state. In the Artibonite area there was an irrigation project and the peasants were chased off the best land, which is now in the hands of the large landowners. The land conflicts arising from the project are as bitter today as they were twenty-five years ago.
On 30th April this year, Aristide announced the formation of the Institute of Agrarian Reform. With the participation of all concerned, especially the peasants, the Ministry of Agriculture and the state, it aims to put in place a programme of agrarian reform for better distribution of the land, so that the land belongs to those working on it and the peasants will have secure tenure of their plots. The intention is to give technical assistance and easy access to repayable credit, so the peasants who are producing the foods are the primary benefactors of production and distribution.
The Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP), the largest and most powerful peasant organisation, wants to work to assist both peasants and the environment. Earlier this year, Aristide released sizeable tracts of state land to be worked by peasant collectives. The MPP is experimenting with various methods of collective organisation on these lands. Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the leader of the MPP, admits that the wording of the 1987 Haitian Constitution regarding agrarian reform is quite vague, '..what we are struggling for is not written in the Constitution but the Constitution foresees co-operative development and the need to produce food for people to eat, not cash crops for the US, so we must now fight to pass concre te laws'.
All this must be regarded in the context of the structural adjustment package that Aristide was bound to in order to return to Haiti last year. One of the plans of the World Bank and the IMF is to have Haiti producing fruit to sell in the States and to become a market for American surplus food stocks. This makes the struggle all the more difficult but, as Chavannes Jean-Baptiste has said, 'We don't look to a future where we [the Haitians] supply the dessert for the plates of the Americans but are then dependent on them for our main meal'.
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