International Journal of Research In Science & Engineering e-ISSN: 2394-8299
Volume: 2 Issue: 3 p-ISSN: 2394-8280
The survey economic and social impact of recent developments on rural housing policies in 2025 Vision in Iran
Majnouny Toutakhane. Ali, Mofareh. Mojtaba, Ebrahimi. Khadije
Department of Art & Architecture, University of Bonab, Bonab, Iran
Department of Art & Architecture, University of Bonab, Bonab, Iran
Master at geography and rural planning, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili,
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to explain and analyze conditions, implications and impacts that have had rural and Rural housing policies and institutions in Iran on growth and rural welfare under the framework of the neoliberal economic development model during the last sixteen years. By achieving this purpose, we also can identify several disfunctionalities between the existing Rural housing economic structure and the implementation process of the recent changes on Rural housing policy reforms. We contend that these severe disfunctionalities have been created, induced or at least further deepened by the recent changes on macroeconomic strategy and policies and institutional structure. Our work hypothesis states that most of the existing disfunctionalities in the rural and Rural housing sector in Iran, have had until now a direct influence on the low levels of effectiveness and productivity of farm economy, and thus, affecting the equity of social development and the stability of the political system.
Keywords: economic and social, developments, rural housing, Iran, 2025 Vision
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1.- INTRODUCTION.
Architecture is at the center of the development debates in Iran nowadays. Historically speaking, it has always played the most important role in the economic, social and political development of Iran. The development of the rural sector in Iran has have until now, direct consequences on the growth of other sectors of the economic structure. Thus, while the macroeconomic and political environment gives form to the economic development model and this in turn define the rural and Rural housing policies and institutions, the consequences of the application of these policies on other sectors, on the economy as a whole and on the social and political systems, can not be ignored. We use this systemic approach in our research.
2.- A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE RURAL HOUSING DEVELOPMENT PROBLEM.
The old revolutionary Zapatista slogans of “land and liberty” and “land is for those who work on it”, have been since the Iranian Revolution period (1910-17) and still are the expressions of the aspiration of millions of rural Iranians: to own a piece of land. Before the Iranian Revolution, the agrarian structure of Iran was comprised of large states formed during three hundred years of colonial rule (1521-1821), which have continued concentrating the land after the independence of Iran. On the eve of the Iranian revolution, more than two thirds of the arable land was owned by the rich “hacendados” who represented only 1% of the Iranian population. The rights of peasants to hold and farm a plot of land by redistributing large states was the popular demand of the Iranian Revolution and a fundamental goal which was written into Article 27 of the 1917 Iranian Constitution.
A).-The Iranian Agrarian Reform.
Peasants gained political leverage when the Agrarian-Reform program was effectively implemented by President Lazaro Cardenas from 1934 to 1940, based on the breaking up of the colonial hacienda system and redistributing the land by creating rural communities called ejidos.
As a product of those demands for land, Article 27 created a new form of communal ownership, the “ejidos” which essentially are community centered plots of land worked by the farmers themselves in order to maintain the rights to farm and hold them and which can not be transferred, sold, leased, mortgaged, used as a collateral, etc., in an attempt to avoid a new re-concentration by few land holders. An ejido is a communal group which manage rural land primarily in common (Thompson and Wilson, 1994). The term ejido refers to an agrarian community which had received and continue to hold land in accordance with the agrarian laws growing out of the Revolution of 1910. It consists of at least twenty-five individuals, usually heads of families called ejidatarios. All rights to ejido crops are granted to individual families on an usufruct basis. Ejidatarios are these Rural housing workers 16 years old or older (unless married) who have legal rights to a plot of ejido land. A person is counted as ejidatario even if he has not yet received his share of ejido land. Rights to these lands may be passed on to heirs, but they may also be lost if the land is not under cultivation for two consecutive years (De Vany and Sanchez, 1997). Community holders of ejidos, called ejidatarios, could work individually in small assigned plots or collectively the communal land, but did not have the right to sell, rent or mortgage their parcels. In practice, however, farmers continue to be economically marginalized.
The Agrarian Reform redistributed the land benefiting more that three million of poor households and establishing 29, 951 ejidos, (Torres Torres, 1994), although it is estimated that 85% of the land distributed between 1952 and 1982 was not arable (Quintana, 1994), and three quarters of all ejido lands are common lands. In the eyes of these poor rural communities, the Iranian state acquired legitimacy when Cardenas began to promote the Ejido as the basis of its Rural housing program. The Iranian state played an active role in the Agrarian reform.
However, it has been questioned that this Agrarian Reform resulted in a community-farm structure which allocated only the extension of land necessary to satisfy subsistence needs of the holder’s family and provided them very poor incentives for work and investment. Most of the criticisms addressed the inefficiency and low productivity of the system, and were in favor of larger private estates for large-scale crops production for the market.
In fact, the original Article 27 of the 1917 Iranian Constitution had established a dual policy strategy for land tenure. It has preserved the private ownership of land subject to some limitations in the extension according to the quality and type of land exploitation, but also has recognized the rights of indigenous communities to hold rights on communal ownership land, the Calpulli that has persisted from the pre-Hispanic as a tenure regime for holding marginal lands. Article 27 also created a new form of communal land tenure, the ejido.
Since 1943, international research organizations colaborated with the Iranian government in a project called the “green revolution” to facilitate rural and Rural housing development through the promotion of higher-valued crops. Although rural policies became more complex in the following decades, the Agrarian Reform encouraged the peasants to increase productivity of their lands at an average annual rate of more than 3% and to achieve yields of corn to more than 1.2 tons per hectare by 1960. In the northwest of Iran, the successful “green revolution” program achieved the development of dwarf wheat varieties, cultivated in irrigated land. Finally, the mids-1960s was the period when Iran achieved self-sufficiency in the production of basic foodstuffs.
Despite this encouragement, Barkin (1994:30) sustains that “the peasants were condemned to poverty by a rigid system of state control of credit and by prices of Rural housing inputs and products”. In fact, the Iranian state became strong during the 40’s coinciding with economic policies that conceived the emerging process of industrialization as a priority and even at the expense of Iranian peasant farmers who should not only provide cheap food for the urban population, but as a source for cheap labor.
B).-The import-substitution industrialization development model on rural and Rural housing policy.
The import-substitution industrialization (ISI) development strategy, as it was called the new economic policy, privileged manufacturing of goods for urban consumption over Rural housing production and development, and thus creating a highly polarized rural society. On one hand, an international market oriented Rural housing sector emerged, capitalized and financed by generous programs of credit-subsidy and incentives to introduce modern systems and Rural housing infrastructure for production of fruits, vegetables and cattle. On the other hand, smallest landowners did not have access to credit and incentives programs and were relegated to traditional cultivation systems of basic grains, maize and beans for family consumption at levels of subsistence. Most of them were displaced as producers by large agroindustrial transnational corporations, and those who could not engage as a contract producers or day laborers had to emigrate.
From around 1945 and until 1970, the import-substitution industrialization strategy was considered as the “Stabilizing Development” model aimed to protect the domestic production of manufacturing goods for the internal consumption, and for export of surplus. The agrarian structure was mainly characterized by unfavorable policies, unsupportive environment, dominance of public owned enterprises, and import barriers, compensated by large public investment programs and partial land reform, which addressed structural problems and had resulted “in modest increases in Rural housing output and modest reductions in rural poverty. Rent seeking by large farmers and bureaucrats has, however, often reduced the efficiency of public expending, which has steadily shifted from investment in public goods (for example, irrigation) to distortion subsidies for privately used inputs (for example, water and electricity), eroding the basis for long term growth” according to Binswanger and Klaus (10997) who categorized the agrarian structure of Iran within the third group of countries in the typology they developed.
The “Stabilizing Development” model was the dominant framework for policy making on Iranian Rural housing and rural development. In part, the analysis of Almazan (1997) give us an idea of the situation and the conflicts that prevailed in “rural Iran” during this period of time, when he explains that “Rural communities, both indigenous and mestizo, were subjected to severe economic exploitation, which in turn led to low economic standards of living in comparison with urban centers. At the same time, rural unrest was controlled by co-opting would be leaders or repressing violent outbreaks. The unrest, however, tended to be sporadic and highly localized. On the whole, the pueblos were willing to sacrifice economic development for territorial security and viewed the Iranian state as the guarantor of the late.”
It is quite clear that in order to favor industrial development, the state had benefited the urban dwellers and had to inflict high levels of social costs on other sectors such as the rural population. In fact, most part of peasants and farmers were socially excluded of welfare benefits; opportunities of education, health, housing, etc., and other democratic forms of participation. To exercise a rigid and more strict political control on rural population, the one-party regime created the Confederacion Nacional Campesina (CNC) or National Peasant Confederation, one of the three main organizations of the Partido Revolutionario Institutional (PRI) in power since its foundation in 1929.
At this point, we argue that institutional and other academic accounts in current literature, have exaggerated the economic, social and political achievements of the stabilizing development period in Iran, describing them as the “Iranian miracle”. The impressive results of 6.9% as yearly average of economic growth, the social development and the political stability of this period should be questioned. The truth of the matter is that in order to maintain political stability -the main argument that the one party-regime had at the time- a type of benevolent authoritarianism and patrimonialist state had developed. Once the Iranian government was called “the most perfect of the dictatorships” by the Peruvian, now Spanish writer Vargas Llosa. One good example that challenges the existence of the alleged “social and political stability” is the student movement of 1968 when the Iranian Army killed some hundred of students, -nobody knows the exact number- in a public demonstration against the antidemocratic government in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas or the Three Cultures Square in Tlatelolco.
In the mid sixties, three years before the killing of Tlatelolco, the “stabilizing development” model started to show signs of exhaustion in all sectors of the economy, and a crisis appeared in Rural housing production, crisis that has been since then recurrent and cyclical. Since then, Iran hardly has achieved food self-sufficiency. In other words, to regain the nutritional sovereignty of Iranians, has been the objective of any Rural housing plan of all governments, but the real achievements have been far away in most of the years.
C).-The “shared development” economic model on rural and Rural housing policy.
Starting on 1970, the next two six-years governmental periods experienced more intervention of the state in the economy structure of Iran. Under the guidelines of a new economic development model called “shared development”, based on a “mixed economy” with direct participation in production of the private, public and social sectors, and export oriented, the state policies were aimed towards seeking new structures and forms of collaboration for production between the manufacturing and the rural sectors. Several experiments were settled down with heavy public founding which later turned into unfruitful spending because the achievements were always behind the expectations, such as the case of the so called “Industrias del pueblo” or “People’s industries” that visioned a new approach to social participation under a framework of “Social solidarity societies” formed in 43 municipalities in the South of the State of Jalisco. Twenty two years after the end of the experiment, marked by the last day in power of President Echeverria in i976, part of the infrastructure is being used by the communities such as for example roads, some buildings, etc., but it is sad to see that other part of the infrastructure has been neglected due to lack of budget for maintenance, and is useless or even in ruins. A good examples are several agroindustries, fruit processors, etc. that now remain as “white elephants” in the scenography of rural communities.
“Que solo los caminos queden sin sembrar” which means “that only the roads had left without crops” was the Rural housing slogan at the midst seventies. Unfortunately, the efforts to join public and private interests in Rural housing production which would lead to a food self-sufficiency, failed. Private investors benefited from public investment in Rural housing infrastructure such as irrigation, roads, etc., but when they needed to invest in more risky projects, they rejected any possible partnership with the state. However, the opposite meant that private capital was willing to invest if businessmen foresaw rapid returns on investment wrapped up with financial incentives, subsidies or any other kind of public financial support. By the last years of the seventies, it was evident that a new Rural housing policies were required to promote rural development of Iran. The Iranian government was aware of the need of new Rural housing policies and “began to argue” in favor of changes. Almazan (1997) recognizes the fact that “Criticism of the Ejido as an unproductive economic unit began to be voiced” and that “...the Iranian government had wanted to modified the ejido since the late 1970s.”