Addressing inequality must include a focus on land redistribution

At the UN General Assembly last week, a group of world-renown economists together with the governments of South Africa, Brazil, Norway and Spain demanded that inequality be taken seriously with the establishment of a UN international panel on inequality (IPI) modelled on the influential International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

An expert-led, high-level panel would expose the problems and define approaches to address them, the UNGA session argued. Nobel prize-winning economist, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, and lead of the initiative, suggests that “Extreme concentrations of income and wealth translate into undemocratic concentrations of power, unravelling trust in our societies and polarising our politics.”

Inequality is the scourge of many societies. Inequality is bad for development – undermining health outcomes, disrupting social cohesion and reducing the possibilities for broad-based, inclusive growth. Yet the strategies for addressing this are clear, in the UK as elsewhere. But inequality is getting worse. The statistics are shocking. The world’s top 10% richest individuals own three-quarters of all global wealth, while the bottom 50% own just 2%. And this has big impacts on the environment as the richest 10% account for 77% of global emissions. “The result is a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability,” argues the World Inequality Report.

This is not just a problem of richer world, as many poorer countries are seeing an increasing division between the extremely wealth and those who remain in poverty. Zimbabwe is no exception and the brazen displays of extreme wealth with announcements of gifts of cars, money, houses and more by the new Zvigananda oligarchs is just the visible sign of an increasingly unequal society.

Land is missing

The IPI initiative emerges from a report commissioned by President Ramaphosa in advance of the G20 held in South Africa this year. The report offers a compelling analysis of the ‘inequality emergency’ arguing that the concentration of wealth and power causes untold damage. But what is surprising – and worrying – is that both this initiative and the World Inequality Report led by another famed economist Professor Thomas Picketty, make no mention of land redistribution. Land is wrapped up in assessments of ‘non-financial assets’ in the World Inequality Report, but the focus is mostly on real estate and housing. In the Stiglitz report, the emphasis is on income inequality and the underlying assets, notably land, are not given great prominence.

A few decades ago, there was also a great outcry about inequality holding back development as newly independent nations grappled with the consequences of colonialism, particularly in the former settler economies. The earlier land reforms in Latin America, as well as East Asia, had paved the way for significant growth and transformations of economies. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and later China had emerged as powerhouses of economic development, and redistributing land was an important precursor.

This seems to have been almost completely forgotten in the current debate. My searches for the words ‘land redistribution’ or ‘land reform’ produced no results in any of the key documents. And this is despite that land redistribution has remained, even in the neoliberal era, an important route to (partial, inadequate and incomplete) redistribution to address inequalities in land holdings. Not necessarily as dramatic land-to-the-tiller revolutionary moves of before but through a whole array of institutional mechanisms.

Putting land reform at the centre of inequality debates

Our forthcoming edited book – Redistributive Land Reform: Challenging Inequality in the 21st Century – makes the case that, if inequality is to be addressed, redistributive land reform must be part of the picture. The book is out on February 4th next year with Bloomsbury (open access and available to pre-order now) and with a wonderful cover featuring the artwork of the great Federico ‘Boy’ Dominguez. The book has cases from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, India, the Philippines, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Scotland. It emerged from discussions held at the Cape Town conference on Land, Life and Society hosted by PLAAS at UWC and fed into the Cape Town declaration from October 2025.

As the book shows, not all experiences have been great, and there have been many reversals and false starts, but the overall story is that land reform remains an important route to addressing the concentration of land and boosting local economies. And in the case of Zimbabwe and South Africa an important part of addressing the injustices of settler colonialism. As the Scottish case illustrates, this is also not just an issue for the ‘Global South’. Land inequality in Scotland – and the UK more broadly – is extreme and there are opportunities for redistribution that both offer opportunities for new rural livelihoods, as well as rethinking inequality in access to affordable housing.

The reviewers of the book highlight how land is central to wider issues of climate, food sovereignty and sustainable development. As Morgan Ody, Secretary General of La Via Campesina argues “In the face of environmental crises, wars and the rise of the far right, rethinking agrarian reform in the 21st century is an absolute necessity.” Former minister of agriculture in Colombia, Martha Carvajalino, notes how “Land redistribution is the redistribution of power; an essential premise for fair and sustainable governance of food systems”. Meanwhile, Professor Ye Jingzhong from China Agriculture University recalls that “China’s agrarian reform, centred on land redistribution, has guaranteed its peasants sustained access to land – a cornerstone of the nation’s prosperity and stability for more than forty years, and a key pillar supporting rural livelihoods.” He continues, “Against this backdrop, the revival of redistributive land reform in the twenty-first century remains of critical importance”. Learning lessons from around the world – as our book tries to do – is central to opening our eyes to the importance of land in addressing inequality in the twenty-first century.

An expert panel on inequality must include a focus on land

I signed up to support the Stiglitz initiative as challenging inequality must be central to future global development, but if the UN backs the idea of a standing panel, with regular reports, then I hope that land redistribution – alongside all the other measures discussed such as progressive taxation, improving workers’ rights, promoting public services, guaranteeing food security and rebalancing state-private roles through industrial policy – will be front and centre. Hopefully the book can be a spur to this happening.

This blog was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland