From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

2 POWER AND POLITICS I OWN, THEREFORE I AMgenerate poverty and exclusion, usually at the cost of women, marginalisedethnic groups, and the poorest communities and castes.Moreover, the claim that distributing formal land titles will openthe floodgates to credit has proved false. Commercial banks do notlike lending to poor people, and poor people are often reluctant to riskputting up their precious new titles as collateral. Recent comparativestudies in slum areas in Buenos Aires and de Soto’s home city of Limacompared families with and without titles to their homes and foundthat land-owning families had no better access to credit. 89 A study of acommunity in Western Kenya seven years after land titles had beenhanded out there found that only 3 per cent of the 896 titles had beenused to secure loans.Distributing land titles that can be bought and sold can deter thosewho would steal land at gunpoint and can provide poor people withoptions, but it can also lead to rising inequality, as large landlordsor farmers buy out their poorer neighbours. The replacement ofcommunally owned lands by individual farm plots in Mexico in the1990s led to a rapid process of land concentration. 90 Similarly,dismantling regimes based on common property often serves as alegal vehicle for removing people in order to gain access to logging,mining, or other resources, as has occurred in Laos.The simplistic approach of privatising and handing out land titlesto individuals is clearly inadequate, even though it is often fundedby donors and fits the electoral ambitions of populist politicians.An effective state needs to ensure that property rights are secure, areequitable, and recognise multiple claims – for example, so that bothhusbands and wives enjoy equal rights via joint titling. Property thereforeshould be registered at individual, family, or community levels. Underpressure from organised slum dwellers, municipal governments areincreasingly recognising the need to strengthen property rightsas a means of formalising the urban economy and ensuring betterprovision of water and sanitation. Neighbourhood associations andfederations of urban poor people are playing a major role in somecities, surveying urban land and negotiating their rights to occupy it. 9173