or many, the image of a homestead conjures up an Alaskan miner staking out his gold claim, but Roy Prosterman and Tim Hanstad started the Rural Development Institute’s Global Homestead Program (GHP) with another vision in mind: to help the poorest of the poor in India and elsewhere. They’ve figured out how to give the dirt poor some dirt. The program’s idea is to give poor families small plots of land—typically a 10th to a 15th of an acre—to build a home and plant a small garden. “We’ve learned from our research that it’s possible, with a remarkably small amount of land, for poor families to achieve significant improvement in their livelihood, substantially increase available nutrition and improve family income,” says Prosterman.

The families this program focuses on are typically agricultural laborers, earning 75 cents to a $1 a day. During times of the year when work in the field slows down, their situations can easily become desperate. “These homestead plots even out the availability of nutrition and income over the course of the year and give people a substantial cushion they would not have otherwise,” says Prosterman.

Hanstad says another important advantage to the Global Homestead Program is the improvement in status of a family that was previously an agricultural laborer family, “Now they are owners, even though owners of a very small piece of land. The way they’re viewed in the village changes quite dramatically. Often when they tell us the advantage of having a homestead plot the very first advantage they’ll describe is improved status in the community.”
The house and garden plots are used to grow a wide array of products, including fruit trees, timber, seasonal crops, vegetables and medicinal herbs. “A typical family on a 4,000-square-foot plot can produce enough cash income over the course of a year to be equivalent to what an agricultural laborer would bring in from working 180 to 200 days a year in the fields,” says Prosterman.

Prosterman is no stranger to land use issues. He left a promising career with a prestigious law firm in 1965 to teach at the University of Washington School of Law and do something about the poverty and under development he’d seen firsthand in Liberia and Puerto Rico while representing clients. “I think the first time I realized homesteading could work was in the 1980s when I began to talk to landless families on the island of Java in Indonesia. They have rich volcanic soils and year-round growing climate. It was remarkable to see what a difference homesteading made in their lives.”

Supported by a three-year grant from the Foundation, the Global Homestead Program has three components. The first is research, the second is developing strategic toolkits and the third is communicating the programs benefits to the international development community.

Hanstad and Prosterman have been working closely with the governments in India and Indonesia to develop a land use plan that addresses the regions’ poverty. “Landlessness is the greatest predictor of poverty,” says Hanstad. “In the past, the conventional wisdom has been that to help a landless person they need to be given a full-size farm. In India, full-size might be five to ten acres. If you want to take that approach to land reform, you’re talking about redistributing a quarter to a third of all the agricultural land in the country. That’s not financially feasible.”

Instead of allowing the governments to give up, the two have been encouraging officials to look at the problem in a different way. “What we brought to the table is research from their own country that shows that while reallocating a full-size farm may not be feasible, the first 10th of an acre you give will generate 70-80% of the benefit you got from two acres,” says Hanstad. “Now we can say, if the governments were to give all the landless people in India a 10th of an acre, you only need about half of 1% of all the agriculture land. And, by the way, you can buy it from the private land market, you need not expropriate it, because it’s quite affordable. Once they become convinced of the concept, the program is quite uncontroversial and the biggest obstacle they have is: ‘How do we operationalize it?’”

The operational question is being directly addressed. Prosterman and Hanstad are building Global Homestead toolkits that will be given away to policymakers, government officials and NGO’s interested in designing and implementing projects that allocate house and garden plots. The toolkits will specifically address how to target beneficiary groups and how to overcome specific practical obstacles. Factors to be considered include land resources, access to water, available land on the land market and proximity to other villages. “Once they start up programs, we’ll assist them directly and help them implement the plan,” says Prosterman.

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