I found this editorial that I thought went perfectly with what we have been discussing in class on John Locke. The article is called Africa's continental divide: land disputes from yahoo news on January 30th. What it's simply saying is that in Africa, there are new legislation that are trying to get passed that would allow women to own land or have the right to land. It also says that the land itself is one of the main reasons for civil unrest and wars that have broken out in many of these African countries. They say that fixing the land problem could lead to fixing various other problems that are afflicting these countries such as poverty, famine, and ethnic conflicts.
The disputes over land comes down to two things: traditional and modernization. Many people feel that they have the right to the lands where they live because it was passed down to them. It was in their families or their villages for centuries. It is their means for livelihood, power, status, and securty. According to Locke, this makes them entitled to it because they added value to it. The are actively using it in order to sustain life. The soil is their bank. The modernizational aspect of it is now people are obtaining titles to certain land and claiming lands of others in the process. In some areas, outsiders don't realize that people are living in certains areas of land because they are hidden from view and they think the land is unclaimed. But in all actuallity, people do live there and have been there for centuries. But you still have outsiders coming in and claiming these lands, displacing the people who live there. They are taking what's not theirs. They are stealing from the native people making public property, private. Title to the land trumps traditions now.
It says that in 2004, 2.5 million acres of land have been allocated by five African goverenments to food production for foreign countries, often without recognizing or fairly compensating farmers with traditional claims to the land. And to add in wars that have occured in many of these countries, you have people leaving their rightful property only to come back and see that someone else has illegally taken possession of it. And the sad thing is that the governments and courts are so corrupt that there is really nthing these people can do about it. With that, there are also land going to waste because of missing landholders.
All this fits in with Locke's veiw of property. If a person has put work into that land then it is his property. To come in and take claim to land that is stealing. To have land and not use it is stealing from others who can put use to it, who can add value to it. But for the corporations who take land, you can look at it as them stealing from the people because they are taking land that is not theirs or you can say that it's ok because they are making money and adding value to it. Who knows.
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I sad to here stories like this when poor farmers or people in general start loosing land due govermental corruption. Locke does agree with you but also there is a catch to what he says. As i remeber in class, one does have the right to claim land that he puts his labor into, and adds greater value to the land by doing so. But also if you recall in the reading, Locke mentions taking away land from the Native Americans, for reason being that they never put it into use.
ReplyDeleteThat is true. Thanks for mentioning that
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