Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Land Reform necessary for democracy in Iraq: "One point he made was that successful democratization, whether in Japan, India or elsewhere, has always been preceded by land reform. And, he pointed out, this sort of measure is completely absent from the American planning for the Iraqi economy. He said that the Baath years had seen enormous inequalities in landed wealth reemerge. We know that Saddam gave property to Sunni Arabs in Kurdish and Shiite regions, and rewarded the clan chieftains who supported him."

The importance of land reform in addressing inequality and making democracy possible is reasonably widely understood. 'Land reform' usually takes the form of either a partition of large estates or a land nationalisation: it is a tragedy the geonomic approach to this issue is almost never discussed, at the least as an alternative.

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