農村土地なし層の発生メカニズムを追って

抄録

This paper focuses on “landlessness” to understand an important aspect of rural poverty. Landlessness has been regarded as a major cause of rural poverty in many developing countries, especially in rice-growing parts of Asia. However, few studies offer a theoretical framework for which to analyze rural landlessness.

The objective of this paper is to identify mechanisms through which many rural people become landless on the grounds of historical experiences and past empirical research outputs. The viewpoints cover population pressure, intra-family and intra-generational transfer of land, agricultural commercialization initiated by the Green Revolution, land reform, other governmental interventions, and vulnerability to natural disasters and environmental degradation. This paper also examines theoretical and policy backgrounds of such mechanisms.

As a result of literature review, this paper concludes that external interventions, such as colonization and development, combined with rapid population growth and physical land loss, have eventually transferred more marginal farmers from the category of farmers to that of the landless through various mechanisms. In theory, those mechanisms are more properly explained in the perspective of Marxian political economy. In conclusion, the causes of landlessness do not necessarily originate from social problems in rural societies. Rather, they have also been problematized and accelerated by such external interventions. Another important point drawn from the literature review is that the interventions were justified by neo-classical economics-led development policies made on the premise of access to land. Therefore, future development for a sustainable rural economy will need to incorporate all categories of the rural workforce, including the landless, on the premise that rural inhabitants do not necessarily have access to land.