The origins of contemporary PNC economic policy: A short review of Carl B. Greenidge’s book on land settlement schemes
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As promised last week, I will do a short review of the book by Minister Carl B. Greenidge, titled, Empowering a Peasantry in a Caribbean Context: The Case of Land Settlement Schemes in Guyana, 1865 – 1985 (UWI Press, 2001). This book is important because it provides insights into the post-2015 policymaking by the PNCR, which I argued in a previous essay determines the core agenda of the APNU+AFC government. The leaders of the AFC are expected to enjoy their personal privileges and leave policy to the PNCR.
Greenidge outlines the African village movement between 1838 and 1852. He touched on several of the constraints faced by the nascent African-Guianese peasantry. These constraints – as well as those faced by indentured immigrants – were also examined by other researchers, such as A. Young (1958), L. Despres (1967), A. Adamson (1972), J. Mandle (1973, 1982), W. Rodney (1981), C. Seecharan (1997) and others. Greenidge places the blame on the shoulders of the colonial administration of the time. The colonial administration had no interest in providing the public goods of drainage and irrigation, farm to market roads, health facilities, and similar, to the new African peasants. Instead, all resources went into protecting the interests of big sugar. I like the book because it is doing economic history, which anchors the events in good economic theory.
The book explained later land settlement schemes (LSS), such as those for Indian-Guianese. The primary purpose of Indian LSS was to tie them to the sugar-plantation economic system in order to maintain a surplus labour situation, which meant decades of low wages. Indians were offered the option of purchasing lands instead of the return passage to India. The purpose here was to get them to live close to the sugar plantations in order to maintain the surplus labour force. Although he alluded to this fact, I am not sure Greenidge fully fleshed out the implication of a plantation economy for the people living in it.
However, Leslie Potter’s doctoral thesis explains that only 1.6% of the 163, 964 Indians who remained made the purchase with their return fee. This meant that most Indians were landless and this would result in the vexing issue, raised by Greenidge, of Indians squatting on and eventually buying unused lands in African villages. The book went on to explain LSS under the early PPP administration. It tends to blame the PPP for choosing poor managers for these cooperative settlements. Nevertheless, the book got back to sound economic theory when it discusses hinterland LSS under Burnham. Greenidge explains that cooperatives were meant to modernize the peasantry; this time, however, in the interior. He outlines the role of the Guyana National Service in this endeavour. He, however, warns of the intrinsic free-rider and coordination problems associated with cooperatives. These problems are inherent in any situation that requires private collective action, such as drainage and irrigation of the polder coastal system in the nascent African peasantry. The book also has implications for the new romanticism of village economies by President Granger. Peasant agriculture cannot succeed while being antagonistic to other agents in the private business community.
The main weakness of the book is its tendency to underemphasize the crucial constraints of limited internal market, external price pressure, and the drainage and irrigation problems (coupled with high rainfall in this part of the planet) that were faced both by the new African peasantry and the small-scale Indian-Guianese farmers. These constraints are exogenous to even the powerful local planters of that era who also faced external price competition for sugar, cotton and coffee. Cotton and coffee plantations disappeared during the 1820s even with enslaved labour. The former faced stiff competition from cheaper cotton grown in the southern United States. By 1830 many sugar plantations started to fail because of the liberalization of trade inside the British Empire. Sugar could only survive as big sugar under estate amalgamation.
It is also important that we consider these exogenous constraints because they are still important for implementing economic policies in the present era. They are also important for curtailing the blaming and counter-blaming. If we don’t consider them, we risk making the same conclusions as those of the late Cedric Grant, who wrote the foreword to Greenidge’s book. Grant wrote: “the undermining of the village movement, coupled with the establishment of LSS for Indians under the aegis of the colonial administration continued to tip the scales against Africans…Greenidge recognized that Africans also contributed to the decline of their bargaining power and their fortunes in relation to those of indentured labourers…” I think this assessment is not only unfair to African ancestors, but also wrongly implies that Indians were given a sweet deal.
Other scholars have argued that the Roman-Dutch law that prevailed in British Guiana at the time placed a severe constraint on the nature of inheritance of the land from deceased parents. This meant that a problem of children’s property emerged. Under this system, which would be changed about 100 years later, all the children had equal claims to the land. In economics, this is not a trivial problem. As economists will say, clear definition of private property rights is necessary for incentivizing future economic production and market activities. The economics profession did not fully come to terms with this wisdom until the 1980s. The African ancestors also thought an egalitarian system of bequeathing land to children was better. This is an understandable position in a time when economics as a subject was under formed.
I once suggested to a UG lecturer to do a survey of all the dilapidated homes and idle properties in Guyana (in African, Indian and mixed villages). The hypothesis was, most of them will be children’s property. The lecturer did not take me seriously. However, my hypothesis is the children’s property dilemma is a constraint on incentives to improve the asset given the tendency to wait until the other sibling makes the first move. Of course, the next sibling is also hoping for the first to fork out the first dollar. Hence, the property becomes underdeveloped and underutilized. When this dilemma is combined with the natural and ecological constraints associated with floods in the low-lying coastal plain, many of the children would eventually leave for the better options education brings. Landless Indians and non-Indians started to move into African-Guianese villages as they bought lands from those moving to the urban centres and into the
service-based high professions. The problem is, most of the sellers did not themselves have a will. This problem has its origin in the Roman-Dutch law of the time. Neither Greenidge nor Grant considered that many of the people who squatted in African villages were also landless blacks from the Caribbean and Africa. The scholar Barbara Josiah brought this point out in her works.
Nevertheless, Grant mentions a major motivator for the PNC protest was the composition of the Land Selection Committee under the PPP/C government that won the election in 1997. Grant complains that the PPP/C packed the committee with its supporters and that these people were placed to make decisions on land distribution in the Region 4 area, which the PNC won in 1997. He noted that “PPP supporters have embarked on the practice of trespassing on the land of non-PPP supporters, tying up landowners in the courts with injunctions and proceeding to cultivate the lands.” I empathize with Cedric Grant on this matter. The PPP/C is usually immune to such sensitivities.
This column is getting to its word limit. Therefore, I will have to discuss other factors relating to the land settlement issue, as well as the notion that owning land will automatically transform into marketable wealth. More on this in the next column in which I will address some of the misconceptions relating to aquatic rice cultivation. However, I cannot write next week, but will be back in a fortnight.
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