Land Tenure Not Cash is the Solution to Third World Poverty

Give a man a fish he eats for a day; give him water rights and a fishing net and he feeds his family for a lifetime. The difference between rich and poor is not that one has cash and the other is cashless. The difference is that the rich have property and assets that represent real resources (I.e land, labor & capital) which they can leverage to borrow money at low interest rates and open lines of credit while the poor only have cash if they have anything at all. The asinine insistence on using cash as a solution to alleviate poverty comes from a softhearted but simple minded economically illiterate view of poverty as a lack of cash. Cash is useful only insofar as there are real resources (i.e. land, labor & capital) to exchange it for or use as collateral. Real resources are freely available in the urban first world, but not so much in the rural third world where the majority live and work on land they don’t have legal ownership over. Only 14% of Hondurans live on land they legally own. Across Africa, only 10% of agricultural land is titled to the people that earn their livelihood from it. Around the globe, about 5 billion people live and work on land they have no legal ownership over. Land titling is not just a legal formality, it’s often the difference between keeping the product of your labor and being able to invest in future production or having it expropriated by your own government or a multinational like United Fruit Co. The first internationally recognized system of land tenure in the Americas was based on the discovery doctrine from which social distinctions in class and race were drawn. Although the legal caste systems are now defunct, land tenure has not deviated much from the original setup; those who live on the margins of cities in unplanned favelas have no legal recourse when their homes and businesses are threatened by criminals or corporate interests working in conjunction with their government. Land reform that grants ownership on the basis of original occupation and use (aboriginal title) or the homestead principle (i.e. those who work the land own the land) is needed to guarantee land tenure to billions of people without it. This is not a silver bullet that will solve poverty immediately, but perhaps combined with capital grants, it is a step towards giving people the resources to build their own wealth instead of subsisting on the charity of others