Tackling rural poverty, together

Philip Mikos

Head of the Environment and Rural Development Unit, DG DEV, European Commission, Brussels

Drafting guidelines was “a pretty good example of donor harmonisation”

Italian agro-economist Philip Mikos started his European Commission career 20 years ago as a development worker in Ethiopia, followed by stints in Burundi and Uganda. Since 1995, despite frequent trips to the field, he has settled at Commission headquarters in Brussels, where he zips to work on a bright red Vespa motor-scooter. Far more cumbersome is his job steering a clear course through the Commission bureaucracy, where he oversees environment, food security and rural development in DG DEV, the Directorate-General for Development. DG DEV formulates the Commission’s development policy, though spending — some €7 billion a year, on 150 countries and territories — is handled by EuropeAid, a separate department of the Commission. Along with many senior rural development experts at donor headquarters elsewhere, Philip Mikos must grapple with the changing paradigms of world trade and economic cooperation, evolving governance structures in developing countries, the knotty issues of donor harmonisation and alignment and new ways to empower rural development workers on the ground. He spoke with Timothy Nater in Brussels.

Nater: You recently coordinated an EU task force that produced the EU Land Policy Guidelines. To what purpose?

Mikos: Land is the main material asset, the very basis of farming. It’s an obvious area for a common EU view. Securing access to land is crucial. Tenure is what makes the difference between a passive farmer with no future and a farmer with plans and ambition. The EU guidelines were designed to start a political discussion in the European Council and Parliament on a common, effective, coherent approach by the Commission and the EU Member States to land reform in developing countries.

Why reform?
Donors have pushed for Western-style land privatisation while often ignoring existing land tenure systems based on customary laws. In Africa, for example, after 40 years of donor effort, the amount of land under ownership title is still minimal. A title deed doesn’t mean much to an African smallholder. He’s not likely to risk it for a loan, even if banks are willing to lend the money, which they usually are not.

That’s not to say titling isn’t important and useful, especially in peri-urban areas where the rule of law is strong, where land is scarce and changes hands more frequently, where farming is done on a more industrial scale and where cadasters exist to ensure that transactions and ownership are properly registered.

But what an African smallholder usually needs is an enforceable right to farm, and secured access to land. Customary tenure systems, based on traditional authorities at local level, can provide that security. The essence of the EU proposal is to help draft laws that respect customary tenure systems and empower local communities and traditional authorities to manage the land.

Drafting joint EU guidelines must be a laborious business.
No, things went rather smoothly. The rural development officials of EU Member States got together in January, 2002, with counterparts in the Commission. The idea was to proceed in parallel with the World Bank’s own Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction report and develop our own specific policy and define a common understanding on how EU donors and other multilateral and bilateral donors would approach partner-governments in developing countries in a coordinated way. We commissioned a Task Force that in early 2004 produced a draft that was ready for civil society consultation through the International Land Coalition, and published the final version in November of that year. All in all, I’d say that the guidelines are a pretty good example of donor harmonisation.

What sort of reaction do you expect from developing countries?
That’s more of a challenge. We’re not having a dialogue on land reform with many governments yet. Unfortunately, donors tend to request a dialogue with governments on land issues only once they’ve become an urgent problem, a source of conflict, as in Namibia, for instance, or Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire or Uganda. And once that happens, it’s difficult for governments to speak openly: land is very political, very sensitive, a matter of national sovereignty.