Battle Against Poverty

Modest Production Rates
Recent issues of GIM International have paid much attention to the implementation of land-administration systems as a means of reducing poverty in developing countries. But what are ‘developing countries’? To answer this, let us first look at the characteristics of ‘developed countries’. In these there is a high level of specialisation, a relatively low number of people involved in producing food and exploring mineral resources; the level of automation within the entire primary sector is high. Job numbers in this sector are lower than in the value-adding industry, where raw materials from agriculture and mining are transferred to, for example, cars, TVs, computers and medicines. A country such as Japan has been able to create and sustain a developed society despite lacking mineral and energy resources within its own territorial boundaries, just by adding value to imported raw materials and energy resources.

Green Revolution
In contrast, a country like Nigeria, with an abundance of mineral and energy resources lying beneath its surface, does not add much value to exploited raw materials and so ends up with GDP per capita of below US$1,000. In developed countries infrastructures including transport of people, materials, energy, electronic and digital signals, and money, are efficient because these activities are well organised and well managed. Family planning and birth control are well accepted and practised at virtually all levels of society. As a result, citizens enjoy a high standard of living, not only material wellbeing as measured by GDP per capita, but also in terms of education, healthcare and life expectancy. Developing countries lack most of the above. The majority of people work in the primary sector: for example, in Nigeria 70% of the population is working in agriculture. Competition among labourers is high, leading to low wages. As a result, employers are not encouraged to invest in automating production processes, so that the overall level of automation in agriculture, mining and construction remains low and production rates per capita accordingly modest.

Power
The battle against poverty in developing countries has for a long time been high on the agenda of Western countries. And that battle has always been associated with the issue of land. At first the focus was on improving the production capacity of a country by converting natural environments into agricultural land. Next, land productivity was increased by introducing mechanisation, fertilisers and insecticides, and by making crop species more disease resistant. The success rate varied; a number of projects failed, partly or entirely because of too rigid an implementation of solutions which worked well in the western context but appeared under different socio-economic circumstances to be counterproductive. But overall the Green Revolution can be classed a success, from the food-production perspective.

However, man lives by more than bread alone, and an essential part of this ‘more’ is the striving of people for power, the drive to rule over others. Improvements induced by external initiatives appeared in the long-run to destabilise the social-economic context, especially in countries where illiteracy is high: it enabled the powerful to gather more power, the rich to collect more money, whilst the poor remained poor or got even poorer. Particularly those living in rural areas suffered from a changing balance of power. In an attempt to relieve misfortune many initiatives were developed by non-profit organisations to encourage small farmers to earn money by themselves being active on the world market. However, these solutions were driven primarily by ideology and the products accordingly found a main market among those willing to pay high prices for low quality; not a permanently sustainable outcome.

Own Your Land
A relatively new weapon in the battle against poverty is facilitating the poor to own land and to secure property rights via effective laws and solid land-administration systems. In effect, attention is shifting from harvesting land produce to the land itself. The basic thinking, strongly advocated by the influential Peruvian economist De Soto, is that land has an economic value and with security of tenure the owner is able to convert his land into liquid assets. By mortgaging land or house, the small farmer and urban dweller are enabled to make investments, even beyond agricultural and housing purposes, and to improve their living standards. To assist in achieving this aim the surveying community is today putting much effort into designing and implementing Land Administration Systems in developing countries.

Good May Be Bad
Every intervention creates non-projected side effects and disturbances. For example, many tourists visiting developing countries believe that by giving large tips they are supporting the local economy. They do not realise that all that money may increase inflation, making even poorer those poor people not involved in the tourist industry. So in thinking we do a good turn, in fact we do a bad one.

Although the ultimate and laudable goal is to arrive at a better world, it is questionable whether the projected result of reducing poverty by implementing Land Administration Systems will be achieved in the long run. Will the ownership of land not end up in the hands of the few powerful and knowledgeable enough to understand the nitty-gritty of the systems and laws, and smart and affluent enough to (mis)use their power? And so once again the powerful may become more powerful and the rich richer, whilst the poor remain poor.