Communal Land Tenure Systems and Their Role in Rural Development

Abstract

Dispassionate analysis of land tenure systems and their role in rural development has been hampered by ideological conflict. Political rhetoric in North America and Western Europe reflecting a general hostility towards the Soviet Union has helped to create a widely held view that communal tenure systems invariably result in stagnation of production, inefficiency of resource allocation and coercion of the peasantry. Where they survive, communal systems are thought to do so partly because of large imports of food from the West and partly because of the existence of a tiny private sector which somehow manages to flourish despite attempts by governments to suppress it.