| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, eds., Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London: Zed Books 2005)

THIS BOOK refocuses the academic discussion of land reform to its due status as central to ending imperialism and promoting social justice throughout the globe. Because the majority of recent academic discussions on agrarian reform have either focused on the mechanism of land reform (i.e., the market vs. expropriation), or placed land reform in the context of the field of development and combating rural poverty, its significance for global social change — and as a challenge to imperialism — has been diminished. The editors correctly assert that "the importance of land reform, beyond the short-term reprieve that it offers the rural poor, is its potential to break the political structures that foster underdevelopment." (52) By framing land reform in this context, the editors bring land reform into the spotlight as a central component to social, economic, and political change, and take the agrarian question beyond simply its role in 'development'.

Additionally, by focusing on the primary tactic employed by contemporary rural social movements, land occupation, the book legitimizes this strategy in the discussion of land reform — another effort that is overdue in academic discussions on the topic. However, the book's analysis could have gone further in looking at how the nature and purpose of some land occupations are shifting. For example, in Brazil, where multinational corporations' holdings and operations are increasingly being targeted for occupations, often the primary purpose of these occupations is not to pressure the government to expropriate and redistribute the land, but to expose the illegal activities of these companies through media attention. This changing character of some occupations may represent an increased militancy on the part of social movements in their resistance to corporate power.

In their introduction, the editors contextualize rural social movements in the present global political, social, and economic order. They focus on neo-liberalism (especially structural adjustment) and the globalization of the agro-food system during the post-war period. The various chapters in the book, focusing on the three central geographic areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, discuss shared tactics of organization, as well as the political, economic, and social exclusion shared by different movements, helping the reader to understand how neo-liberalism has had similar effects in rural areas throughout the world. The book also highlights the differences and nuances (i.e., indigenous, separatist, armed, etc.) of different movements, as outcomes of country-specific circumstances.

While the editors do point out the importance of the World Social Forum as a place and space for rural social movements to share information and form transnational alliances, again the book could have gone further in its discussion of how contemporary rural social movements are globalizing, particularly through the recent emergence, organization, and growth of the Via Campesina. The Via Campesina serves an important function for information-sharing and solidarity amongst rural social movements across the globe. Yet it appears that its role as an umbrella organization for rural movements is also changing. Indeed, related to the changing nature of occupations discussed above, the Via Campesina is beginning to organize occupations that target multinational corporations, and participants in these occupations are members of social movements throughout the world. An example is the Via Campesina's recent action at Aracruz Corporation in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in which 2,000 people united to uproot over one million eucalyptus seedlings, and destroyed the company's tree-cloning laboratory. Such actions demonstrate how social movements themselves are globalizing and unifying their different struggles, and their growing militancy, in the face of economic globalization and growing corporate power. These developments also highlight how the Internet has been a major tool for the Via Campesina to spread and share information.

This book is a good read for anyone interested in understanding how rural social movements are organizing, evolving, and changing in the current global neo-liberal context. It provides good evidence for how contemporary rural social movements that are organizing for land reform offer perhaps the most tangible and real effort at global social change today.


Isabella Kenfield University of California

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