Roy Prosterman, Founder & Chairman Emeritus, Rural Development Institute

Initiative Session Date: December 13, 2005

Summary:

Professor Prosterman's talk made it clear that the land issue in China remains critically important.  The central government is attempting to establish 30-year land rights, he explained, so farmers will have the necessary security to make long-term investments in the land that they have been unwilling to make given their historically short tenure of the land.  The government, however, is far less advanced in providing citizens with adequate, formal documentation of their land rights.  The main issue, Prosterman continued, is giving people ownership and control over the land that they are already living on; there is also a need to reach completely landless families, whether urban or rural, and give them access and title to the land.  People who do have adequate documentation of land ownership are beginning to invest in the land and acquire land wealth.  Professor Prosterman concluded that this is probably the only route for China to take to successfully reduce the destabilizing gap between rural and urban incomes.

“They’ve [Latin America] already had a huge migration to cities, not because the pull of the jobs, but because the push of poverty in the countryside and have made many of the cities in towns unlivable with crime and other problems. We want to make sure that does not happen in China...”

       -Roy Prosterman, speaking to the Initiative for Global Development

Biography