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Abstract:
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"Smallholders have private property. Rights in resources--farmland, livestock, fruit trees, firewood, irrigation water--as well as the technology that renders these resources productive--granaries, barns, plows, wagons, and hand tools. Some continuing, socially recognized rights in the land and animals belong to the cultivation. These rights of tenure are what smallholders hold. Such rights may be embodied in deeds, tax valuations, and wills, they may be enforceable by courts under the jurisdiction of the state, or they may depend on customs relating to the acquisition, use, and social transmission of certain resources and technologies within the little community. Though rights may be formally assigned to certain individuals and nested within more inclusive systems of rights belonging to lineages, villages, landlords, nobles, estate owners, and the political administration of the county, district, or state, they are associated in a fundamental manner with the farm household and reflect its on-going relationship with productive property. Household members work on a particular farm, they derive appreciable benefits from it, and their investment of labor and capital over time establish and sustain valuable property rights that may pass to close kin by inheritance. Intensive agriculture under circumstances of population pressure and market demands emphasizes well defined, defensible, and enduring private property rights in a qualitatively different manner from hunting and gathering, fishing, or shifting cultivation. Though we are accustomed to thinking of land tenure as a set of rural concepts or legal rules externally formulated and enforced by political bodies, we will examine property rights here as part of a local agro-ecosystem, testing the hypothesis that, other things being equal, land use by and large determines land tenure. Private individual or household property, frequently accompanied by corporate group rights in common property, are regularly and systematically associated with smallholder intensive agriculture."
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