| | A great proportion of government budgets and foreign exchange is going into two kinds of projects supposed to benefit ordinary peasant farmers. In practice they do anything but. Many are resettled and in the process lose some of their acreage, or the use of it for a couple of seasons, or the most fertile portions, or their trees, their houses, or access to water or firewood. Others downstream of the schemes have lost the annual flooding that made their land fertile. Even those on the irrigated plots often cannot afford the extra costs of this new commercial farming and rent out their land or sell it. In these ways, secondary changes, in land tenure, entrench capitalist farming, which in fact benefits only those with the cash, the larger holdings or the preferential loans to make it profitable. |
