People's Democracy

THE Department of Development Planning of the government of West Bengal hosted an international conference on "Agrarian Relations and Rural Development in Less Developed Countries" in Kolkata over January 3-6, 2002. The conference was inaugurated by chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, and the inaugural session was addressed by development and planning minister Nirupam Sen, minister for panchayats and rural development Surjya Kanta Mishra and finance minister Asim Dasgupta.

The Conference brought together more than thirty scholars from within India and across the world, especially from other developing countries. There were scholars from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, South Africa, Bangladesh, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, Egypt, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. (The participants included the Director, Institute of Rural Development of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Professors from El Colegio de Mexico and Universidad Central in Cuba, the Economic Transformation Coordinator of the South African Communist Party, the Standing Vice-Chairman of the Economic Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam and others.) There were also Indian scholars from Delhi, Chennai, Trivandrum, Tiruchi and Kolkata.

There is much important work going on across the world on issues of agrarian change and the life and work of rural working people in developing countries. However, such scholars, especially from countries of the South, rarely get a chance to meet and exchange ideas and analysis. In his welcome address to the participants, the minister for development and planning of the government of West Bengal expressed the hope that this initiative to bring together those who are working on problems of the rural economy in the context of globalisation would lay the basis for more such productive interaction in future.

The Conference covered a wide range of theoretical issues and empirical experiences. Some of the theoretical papers addressed the question of the effectiveness and reliability of different types of land reform, ranging from changes in land tenure to property redistribution. Other papers focussed on the macroeconomic context of liberalised trade and mobile financial flows, and the impact of these on longer term paths of rural transformation. Some of the country case studies (especially on Mexico, Chile, Cuba, China, Bangladesh and Brazil) were concerned with changes in agrarian relations because of processes unleashed by globalisation. Other case studies (on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Philippines and Sub-Saharan Africa) identified the nature of and constraints on land reforms in the contemporary period. There were several papers on Indian experiences, including papers on West Bengal and Kerala, which went from macroeconomic trends to state wise patterns to a study of a particular village over two decades.

A number of issues were discussed that are currently of great importance to material and social conditions in the countryside of the developing world. It emerged that while the specific contexts and historical processes of each country and region may be different, there are common concerns and worries. There were deep concerns expressed about the constraints raised by the forces of globalisation to the transition to more egalitarian rural societies and economies, and the strategies that could be adopted to counter this were discussed. Thus the effects of price changes in world markets, the effects of mobile finance in restricting important areas of public expenditure, and the problems of reliability of small cultivators faced with competition from large international producers, were highlighted and the ways in which these could contribute to agrarian distress were discussed. It was noted that public strategies to counter this distress can only be successful in the context of large scale mobilisation of rural workers and peasants.