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Subject: RE: The Curse of India's Socialism
From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
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Date: 21 Aug 2002 11:19:58 -0700

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 14:16, Dave Long wrote:
> >                                                                   In the
> > Philippines, getting legal title can take 20 years.  In Egypt, about 80%
> > of the population in Cairo lives in places where they are officially
> > illegal.
> 
> If the situation in Egypt is anything
> like the situation in the Philippines,
> it's because people (due to a strange
> desire for jobs) squat on land which
> they don't own.*


The Philippines suffers from a Spanish-imposed aristocratic landowner
class, the same as in most of Latin America, with the serf-like
relationships that go with it.  You have multiple generations of
peasants/squatters that cultivate and live on the lands almost as a
human parts of the property package.

The problem in the Philippines is that the landowner class is fading,
but the peasants are still operating under the old economic assumption
even though it isn't being imposed on them in most cases.  In a number
of areas, you have landowners that don't use their lands during bad
years (i.e. when sugar prices fall too low or some other condition that
makes planting unprofitable in the global economy) and in some cases
have all but abandoned them, but when they come back to plant crops
several years later they find the same peasants living on the fallow
land as scratch farmers to survive and waiting for the landowner to come
back and give them something to do.

The government's solution to this was to "redistribute" fallow land to
the peasants that lived on them, and created a number of problems in the
process.  First of all, it meant that all the agricultural producers had
to plant crops all the time (profitable or not) or the government would
seize the land and give it to someone else, which is not economically
optimal by any means.  Second when they give it to the peasants, they
use it to become scratch farmers, which is not a particularly productive
economic activity, and the landowners generally let them do that for
free when the land is fallow anyway.  Third, the peasants generally
*prefer* to work for the landowner rather than own the land themselves;
they make more money, have more opportunities to become middle-class,
and enjoy a better lifestyle under that arrangement.  So the result of
all this is that the landowners either run an economically sub-optimal
agriculture business to protect their lands, or they risk having their
land seized without compensation and given to the peasants/squatters who
will gladly sell it back to the plantation owner rather than becoming
scratch farmers, another economically sub-optimal solution. The only
real role of the government in this arrangement is to be a drag on the
economy.

And I don't know about 20 years for land titles in the Philippines.  It
takes a little longer than in the US (though not much), and you may have
to bribe someone to make it work well in an expedited manner, but it
isn't that onerous in the regions I'm familiar with.

Speaking as a former Philippine plantation owner. (Yes, really. On
Negros and Cebu. Have I led a strange life or what?)

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com

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