A/HRC/16/63 C. Absence of agrarian reform and rural development policies, including irrigation and seeds 28. To protect the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas, more attention needs to be paid to agrarian reforms that benefit landless peasants and small-scale land holders and promote security of tenure and access to land.50 Agrarian reforms are successful when land reform radically reduces inequalities in land distribution and is accompanied by sufficient access to other inputs, including water, credit, transport, extension services and other infrastructure. 29. While the “death” of agrarian reform was proclaimed in the 1970s, and few efforts were made to conduct land reform programmes in the 1980s and early 1990s, land reform returned to the international agenda in 1996. In the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action, land reform was a key part of States’ commitments.51 In the Declaration of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, organized by FAO and the Government of Brazil in March 2006, 95 States recognized the importance of establishing appropriate land reform to secure access to land for marginalized and vulnerable groups, and of adopting adequate legal frameworks and policies to promote traditional and family agriculture.52 30. Land reforms in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan Province of China, China and Cuba have had a significant impact on reducing poverty and hunger and increasing economic growth. In India, the States with the steepest declines in poverty from 1958 to 1992 were those that implemented land reform.53 More recently, the move towards transformative and redistributive agrarian reform has been successfully chosen by the Government of Bolivia (Plurinational State of). Despite the re-emergence of land reform on international and national agendas, the World Bank continues to promote models of agrarian reform that emphasize the market and are compatible with the Washington Consensus. The “market-assisted” or “negotiated” models of land reform of the World Bank seek to overcome elite resistance to land reform by offering credit to landless or landpoor farmers so that they can buy land at market rates from large landholders, with the State playing a part only in mediation and the provision of credit.54 These models have been bitterly criticized by non-governmental organizations and social movements.55 31. Well-formulated rural development policies are also essential to fulfil the rights of people working in rural areas. In the past three decades, however, support for agriculture has dramatically decreased. Many indebted developing countries have been forced to reduce their support for small farmers and liberalize their agriculture, under strong pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. At the same time, between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of official development aid directed to agriculture dropped from 13 per cent to 3.4 per cent, or from $2.63 billion to $1.9 billion.56 This situation 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 A/65/281. See FAO, Report of the World Food Summit, 13–17 November 1996 (WFS 96/REP), part one, appendix.. FAO, Report of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, Pôrto Alegre, Brazil, 7–10 March 2006 (C 2006/REP), appendix G. IFAD, Rural Poverty Report 2001. Peter Rosset, “Tides Shift on Agrarian Reform: New Movements Show the Way” (winter, 2001). Available from www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Reforming_System/Agrarian_Reform.html. “Land for those who work it, not just for those who can buy it”, Final declaration of the international seminar on the negative impacts of World Bank market-based land reform policy, April 2002. Jean Feyder, Ambassador of Luxembourg, “Panel on African Food Security: Lessons from the Recent Global Food Crisis”, forty-seventh executive session of the Trade and Development Board, Geneva, 11