The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Another phase of land reforms unviable: Isaac

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Thursday, Sep 20, 2007
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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Another phase of land reforms unviable: Isaac

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Finance Minister Thomas Isaac has said that another phase of reforms to transfer the land from the small holders to the agricultural workers is unviable both socially and politically in the State.

Addressing the college-level economics teachers participating in the refresher course at the academic staff college of the University of Kerala at Karivattom near here on Wednesday, Dr. Isaac said: “It took about 50 years of arduous struggle in the agricultural front to distribute the land being held by five per cent of the people to 50 per cent of the farmers. Now how many years will it take to redistribute the land from these 50 per cent of the people to the agricultural workers?”

He said classical capitalist form of development was also not possible in Kerala’s agricultural sector because of the high land prices.

People are investing in land here as a speculative asset and not to make any productive gain out of it. It was also not possible to put a ceiling on land prices because almost every section had a piece of land and all of them were keen on appreciation of the land price. Emphasising that agrarian question in Kerala was a complex issue, Dr. Isaac said it was impossible to impose a solution to it either from the conventional Marxist or capitalist paradigms.

Efficiency

For example, it was difficult to improve the peasant efficiency here as even the small land holders employ wage labourers. And they could employ labourers only till the productivity of the cultivated land was comparable to the wages.

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