Limitation of Land Use Rights
While traditional agrarian reform usually meant limiting
ownership rights and was targeted at the large landowners,
the current situation requires a limitation of land use rights
and reforms which are targeted at all cultivators, large and
small, market-integrated and subsistence-oriented.
Limitations of land use rights are necessary in order to
stop environmental degradation caused by agriculture. Traditionally,
smallholders were seen as persons who guarantee a sustainable
agriculture because of their generational thinking and their
"farm centered" life organization. In modern times,
this does not hold true. All over the world land use is practically
more or less unrestricted. Modern technology, increase in
population pressure as well as changing attitudes have disturbed
the equilibrium between land use and sustainability, because
individuals use the land for their private gains at the expense
of the land resource common to mankind:
- European farmers apply nitrogen to an extent that the
ground water becomes polluted, i. e. for the sake of private
benefit the consequences for the common good are neglected.
- African herdsmen enlarge their private herds to such
a degree that public grazing lands are affected and eventually
destroyed.
- Latin American timber companies cut large areas of Amazon
rain forest in order to exploit the few high-value timber
trees. Thus they damage the entire eco-system with all its
consequences.
- Asian poor and often landless cultivate steep slopes
to harvest some staples for their family's subsistence at
the cost of quick erosion and devastation of the vegetation.
Examples are numerous. A new phase of agrarian reform is
necessary including measures which assure that private interest
and public interest are harmonized, and that individuals cannot
exploit public property for their egoistic interests. The
notion of social accountability in property rights ("Sozialpflichtigkeit
des Eigentums") has to come to the forefront whenever
technologies endanger the ecosystem. Such a "code of
land use" is urgently needed if environmental degradation
is to be stopped.
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