Farmland Transaction, Resource Reallocation, and the Rise of Land-Seizing Rural Elites

It is widely assumed among economists that farmland transaction, as a means of optimizing the reallocation of resources, contributes to farmers’ income. Unfortunately, farmers received little protection in farmland transaction and the restructuring of resources. Investors, bureaucrats, and social elites were all involved in the reallocation of agricultural resources and competed for the newly available resources injected from the top down, thus becoming new types of entrepreneurial rural elites that controlled farmland-related interests. As farmland, a basic form of social security for decades, was gradually transformed into a transactable commodity, the principles of equity and subsistence intrinsic to the original equal distribution of farmland also yielded to the realities of seizure by force and possession by capital, hence leading to the restructuring of social relations embedded in the farmland. Rural elites of various backgrounds (profiteering investors, rent-seeking bureaucrats, or market manipulators) all sought to seize the resources newly allocated by the state, hence the new phenomena of “the scramble for farmland by the elites” and “profit-sharing” among them.