Land Reform

LONDON -- With his sweeping land-reform decree, Russia's President Boris Yeltsin has performed the 20th-century equivalent of alchemy -- Russian farms once so much dross are now free to become path-setters in economic revival.Land reform can charge the batteries of an under-developed economy more effectively than any other single measure.In any country where a significant number of people live from the land, breaking up a non-productive feudal system -- or in Russia's case, an even more unproductive state system -- can produce a surge of economic activity that transforms the countryside and provides large amounts of capital for the second step, the industrial revolution.

Red, the color code for development, has proliferated on planning maps of Maryland since the 1970s. And if current trends continue, it will almost eliminate by 2030 the green spaces on maps of the state's central area and along the Chesapeake Bay, according to organizers of a forum on growth held in Bel Air. A presentation on growth that included a progression of redder maps was part of a Smarter Growth forum that drew more than 50 people to the Bel...

MOSCOW -- The Russian Parliament has approved a resolution allowing private ownership of land for the first time in 70 years.The vote was seen as a blow to the reform policy of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who earlier declared his opposition to the idea. Gorbachev had favored grants to peasants under 100-year leases.After the vote, the Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, said his republic, the largest and richest in the Soviet Union, would not sign a new national union treaty until Moscow acknowledged the republic's rights over its enormous natural wealth, including gold, oil and timber.

Environmentalists may soon have something big to rejoice: Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal to upgrade Maryland's Chesapeake Bay Critical Area program appears to be headed for passage. The House has approved the bill - thanks to some reasonable compromises with local government and others who had opposed it. The Senate should soon follow suit. Achieving such a broad consensus was no small matter. The legislation not only updates the basic components of the program, but also gives the Critical Area Commission greater say over land-use decisions and significantly strengthens enforcement standards.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- The South African government introduced legislation in Parliament yesterday aimed at repealing eight decades of mandatory racial discrimination in housing and land ownership.The land reform bills are the first concrete steps taken by President Frederik W. de Klerk's government since he promised in a speech Feb. 1 to repeal all remaining apartheid laws. The legislation also would provide blacks with assistance in acquiring land."The government has now decided . . . to repeal all measures that regulate land rights and land tenure according to race and population group," said a memorandum explaining the government's new land reform policy.

MMABOI, South Africa -- When the new post-apartheid South African government launched a program to return property stripped from black communities under white rule, members of the Mojapelo tribe rushed to the front of the line to stake their claim. That was five years ago. They are still waiting. Mired in bureaucratic and legal red tape, the claim has gone nowhere. Government officials promising action have paraded into the tribe's poor, windswept village in the Northern Province, never to be heard from again.

London -- You reap what you sow when you attempt to develop an underdeveloped country. This is Mexico's lesson -- and Algeria's, Pakistan's, Turkey's and Egypt's.A whole range of half-developed countries are finding out belatedly what they were told 30 years ago -- if you don't have land reform, if you don't breed a strong and prosperous peasantry, if you don't halt the mad rush to the town, if you don't make your villages attractive with safe water and rural clinics, if you don't educate your young girls so that they themselves are moved to control the birth rate, you are going to have economic, if not political, Armageddon.

PEARSON FARM, Zimbabwe - On this farm of freshly plowed fields bordered by gum trees, just north of Harare, it should be the planting season. The tractors, though, are quiet. The fields are empty of workers. Farm owner Robin Marshall is sipping coffee on his back porch and anxiously watching clouds drift across the wide African sky, like grains of sand through an hourglass. Each is a reminder that precious days are slipping away before the first rains fall this month. If he tries to put one seed in the ground, he will be beaten up, maybe killed, he fears.

KAYANJE FARM, Zambia - When a truckload of government-sponsored thugs chased Chris Thorne and his family from their wheat and soybean farm in Zimbabwe three years ago, ransacking his home and decrying him as a racist, Thorne was left to wonder whether a white farmer like him could have a future in Africa. Thorne is finding his answer in Zambia. Just north of Lusaka, Zambia's sleepy capital, Thorne is busy felling trees, leveling termite hills and laying irrigation lines to expand his new 7,000-acre tobacco and maize farm.

LONDON -- Democracy has finally arrived in Mexico, leaving only Cuba out on a distant limb in Latin America.Yet the substance of the opposition's election victories is less tangible. Can the newly elected mayor of Mexico City, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, who now stands a good chance of winning the presidency itself in the year 2000, deliver to the poor and dispossessed of Mexico what the demagogy of electioneering seemed to promise?Indeed, this is the question for all of democratic, free-market Latin America, except the continent's one success story, Chile.

KAYANJE FARM, Zambia - When a truckload of government-sponsored thugs chased Chris Thorne and his family from their wheat and soybean farm in Zimbabwe three years ago, ransacking his home and decrying him as a racist, Thorne was left to wonder whether a white farmer like him could have a future in Africa. Thorne is finding his answer in Zambia. Just north of Lusaka, Zambia's sleepy capital, Thorne is busy felling trees, leveling termite hills and laying irrigation lines to expand his new 7,000-acre tobacco and maize farm.

BARINAS, Venezuela - Richard Padron was born under democracy and into modern-day vassalage. "My dad worked on a cattle ranch," says the sinewy Padron, 25, wearing mud-coated, black rubber boots and with a butcher knife in a leather sheath at his side. "The owner let him use five acres to grow corn and a few other crops to eat. The wages were enough for food, but not much else. I left school and began working with him when I was 14." Padron still lives in poverty. He and his wife and two children survive largely off corn, and they sleep in hammocks with several other families in a dilapidated concrete-block farmhouse.

His critics accuse President Robert G. Mugabe, who has run Zimbabwe since the African nation became independent from Britain 21 years ago, of destroying democracy and ruining the country. Mugabe blames Zimbabwe's troubles on others, including the former colonial power, Britain, and the news media. He says outsiders, especially whites, dislike a legitimate campaign of land reform that is distributing farms to deserving, and landless, blacks. The country has its troubles: Militants, sanctioned by the government, have been steadily driving whites off their farms, allowing squatters to move in. During a wave of assaults last week, 23 farms were looted and the landowners were forced to flee.

PEARSON FARM, Zimbabwe - On this farm of freshly plowed fields bordered by gum trees, just north of Harare, it should be the planting season. The tractors, though, are quiet. The fields are empty of workers. Farm owner Robin Marshall is sipping coffee on his back porch and anxiously watching clouds drift across the wide African sky, like grains of sand through an hourglass. Each is a reminder that precious days are slipping away before the first rains fall this month. If he tries to put one seed in the ground, he will be beaten up, maybe killed, he fears.

MMABOI, South Africa -- When the new post-apartheid South African government launched a program to return property stripped from black communities under white rule, members of the Mojapelo tribe rushed to the front of the line to stake their claim. That was five years ago. They are still waiting. Mired in bureaucratic and legal red tape, the claim has gone nowhere. Government officials promising action have paraded into the tribe's poor, windswept village in the Northern Province, never to be heard from again.

LONDON -- Democracy has finally arrived in Mexico, leaving only Cuba out on a distant limb in Latin America.Yet the substance of the opposition's election victories is less tangible. Can the newly elected mayor of Mexico City, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, who now stands a good chance of winning the presidency itself in the year 2000, deliver to the poor and dispossessed of Mexico what the demagogy of electioneering seemed to promise?Indeed, this is the question for all of democratic, free-market Latin America, except the continent's one success story, Chile.

BARINAS, Venezuela - Richard Padron was born under democracy and into modern-day vassalage. "My dad worked on a cattle ranch," says the sinewy Padron, 25, wearing mud-coated, black rubber boots and with a butcher knife in a leather sheath at his side. "The owner let him use five acres to grow corn and a few other crops to eat. The wages were enough for food, but not much else. I left school and began working with him when I was 14." Padron still lives in poverty. He and his wife and two children survive largely off corn, and they sleep in hammocks with several other families in a dilapidated concrete-block farmhouse.

His critics accuse President Robert G. Mugabe, who has run Zimbabwe since the African nation became independent from Britain 21 years ago, of destroying democracy and ruining the country. Mugabe blames Zimbabwe's troubles on others, including the former colonial power, Britain, and the news media. He says outsiders, especially whites, dislike a legitimate campaign of land reform that is distributing farms to deserving, and landless, blacks. The country has its troubles: Militants, sanctioned by the government, have been steadily driving whites off their farms, allowing squatters to move in. During a wave of assaults last week, 23 farms were looted and the landowners were forced to flee.

LONDON -- With his sweeping land-reform decree, Russia's President Boris Yeltsin has performed the 20th-century equivalent of alchemy -- Russian farms once so much dross are now free to become path-setters in economic revival.Land reform can charge the batteries of an under-developed economy more effectively than any other single measure.In any country where a significant number of people live from the land, breaking up a non-productive feudal system -- or in Russia's case, an even more unproductive state system -- can produce a surge of economic activity that transforms the countryside and provides large amounts of capital for the second step, the industrial revolution.

London -- You reap what you sow when you attempt to develop an underdeveloped country. This is Mexico's lesson -- and Algeria's, Pakistan's, Turkey's and Egypt's.A whole range of half-developed countries are finding out belatedly what they were told 30 years ago -- if you don't have land reform, if you don't breed a strong and prosperous peasantry, if you don't halt the mad rush to the town, if you don't make your villages attractive with safe water and rural clinics, if you don't educate your young girls so that they themselves are moved to control the birth rate, you are going to have economic, if not political, Armageddon.