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Agrarian Relations, Institutions, and Land Reform in Nepal

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Agricultural Transformation in Nepal

Abstract

The chapter analyzes the main issues related to access to land and poverty, landownership distribution, access to land for women and the indigenous peoples, landlessness and lack of viable landholdings, land rentals, tenancy rights, and fallow land. It reviews existing laws and policies on land and land rights, land reform in the context of smallholder agriculture, and land administration. It also draws lessons for Nepal from the experiences of other countries in land reform. Finally, it makes policy recommendations to enhance the access to the landless and marginal farmers to land and also to improve access to vital infrastructure such as farm roads and irrigation, technical support system, marketing, and land consolidation, which are vital for agricultural productivity enhancement and income increases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Radical land reform, here, refers to a practice of fixing a ceiling on landownership and state taking the control of excess land without paying the price for the land, and then freely distributing the land to the needy people like landless or marginal farmers or farm laborers. It is assumed, here, that ‘land’ is a part of natural capital to which everyone has free access and only the state is the owner.

  2. 2.

    This included programs like land bank which would facilitate the linkage between willing sellers of land (generally landowner) and willing buyers of land (landless and marginal farmers, farm laborers), tenure reform, incremental taxation on land to discourage large holdings, land consolidation, and the like. Nepal had a ‘land bank’ program until 2006, but this was discontinued, as there was a claim that it helped just to buy the land of large landowners at higher prices who were after all prepared to sell land in the market at lower prices. But, again, afterward, there were suggestions to have a land bank, which would connect land sellers and land buyers to be supported by the government’s subsidy and the price to be fixed by the government’s agencies based on market survey.

  3. 3.

    Like bondage, unfree labor, and imperfect labor market where there is no perfect information about the work, wage rates, and no willing buyer and willing supplier of labor.

  4. 4.

    Remittance in Nepal is equivalent to 29.2% of the GDP, which is more or less equal (including the remittances coming from informal sources) to contribution of agricultural sector (33% of GDP). Nepal Living Standard Survey Reports reveal a significant increase in the proportion of households receiving remittances (23.4% in 1993/94 to 31.9% in 2003/04 and 55.8% in 2010/11). The volume of remittances each household received was Rs. 15,160 in 1993/94, Rs. 34,698 in 2003/04, and Rs. 80,436 in 2010/11 (CBS 2013).

  5. 5.

    The data on average landholding size is slightly different from one study to another.

  6. 6.

    About 24.5% households are landless and 7% households semi-landless, owing less than 0.2 acres (UNDP 2004). According to CRSC, there are 1.02 million landless families and additional 450 thousands (0.45 million) Jotaha or Hali families, i.e., those who plow other’s land usually on annual (Haliya—Reading Material-5, pp. 1–2, not dated). As early as 1994, Badal Commission on Land Reform had estimated that about 500,000 people were completely landless in the early 1990s.

  7. 7.

    CRSC (nd). Haliya. Reading Material-5. pp. 1–2.

  8. 8.

    However, there is other data that counters the government’s agriculture census reports. In 1985, according to a study carried out by IDS, 31% of farm families were tenants—10.8% registered and 22.3% nonregistered (IDS 1985). According to Badal Commission, there were 0.56 million tenant farmers in 1994, 20% farm families were tenants, and total land area cultivated by them was about 12% of the cultivable land. At that time, the registered tenants were 370,127, of which 72% lived in the Terai, 24% in Kathmandu valley, and 4% in the hills. According to Nepal Living Standard Survey II (2003–04), 31% farmers (about one million farm families) work as tenants.

  9. 9.

    These include Land Acquisition Act 1977, Land Act 1964, Birta Abolition Act 1959, Land Revenue Act 1977, Trust Corporation (Guthi) Act 1976, Land Survey and Measurement Act 1963, Range Land Nationalization Act, 1974. Similarly, Forest Act 1993 and Forest Regulations 2000 are important Acts to govern forestland.

Abbreviations

ADB:

Asian Development Bank

BS:

Bikram Sambat (Nepali year)

CARP:

Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program

CBS:

Central Bureau of Statistics

CSRC:

Community Self-Reliance Centre

DFID:

Department for International Development

DoLIA:

Department of Land Information and Archive

FDI:

Foreign Direct Investment

GDP:

Gross Domestic Product

GLOF:

Glacial Lake Outburst Flood

GoN:

Government of Nepal

IDS:

Integrated Development Study

IFAD:

International Fund for Agriculture Development

IPs:

Indigenous Peoples

LFUG:

Leasehold Forest Users Group

MLRM:

Ministry of Land Reform and Management

NA:

Not Available

NGO:

Non-Governmental Agency

NLSS:

Nepal Living Standard Survey

UNDP:

United Nations Development Program

WTO:

World Trade Organization

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia

    Jagannath Adhikari

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  1. Jagannath Adhikari
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Correspondence to Jagannath Adhikari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Visiting Scientist, International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Patan, Nepal

    Ganesh Thapa

  2. Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi, India

    Anjani Kumar

  3. Former Director, South Asia Office, International Food Policy Research Institute, New Delhi, India

    P.K. Joshi

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Adhikari, J. (2019). Agrarian Relations, Institutions, and Land Reform in Nepal. In: Thapa, G., Kumar, A., Joshi, P. (eds) Agricultural Transformation in Nepal. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9648-0_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9648-0_17

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