Lessons from East Asian Land Reform for Syria
Syria must undertake land reform and boost agricultural productivity as the first step in rebuilding its economy.
In early April 2025, Syria’s foreign minister, Asad Al-Shaibani, met with his South Korean counterpart, Cho Tae-yul, in Damascus. It was a historic visit during which South Korea and Syria formally established diplomatic relations following decades of Syria’s former Baathist government allying with North Korea. In the meeting, Al-Shaibani expressed enthusiasm for learning from the South Korean experience of development, and Minister Cho reciprocated by conveying his nation’s willingness to share its knowledge and expertise.
South Korea is one of a small group of nations outside of Europe and North America that have successfully climbed to the summit of the development ladder. The other members of this elite group are Japan, Taiwan, and China. While differing in many respects, what we will call the ‘East Asian Four’ have been united in their adherence to a distinctive form of political economy defined by the pragmatic fusion of strong state capacity with the cut-and-thrust of free enterprise – ‘state capitalism’ – deployed to support a manufacturing and export-led development model.
One of the key elements of the East Asian experience that deserves closer examination is agricultural policy. While the success of their respective industrial policies is well known, it is often forgotten that the governments of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and (post-1978) China underwrote their drive to industrialisation with complementary agricultural policies. In the process, they created a level of rural wealth and food abundance hitherto unprecedented in East Asia. They shunned the ‘urban bias’ that has so often undermined other nations’ development bids, realising that a flourishing countryside was a necessary prerequisite for any successful and sustainable industrial development.
Land Reform in East Asia
The main policy tool that Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and (post-1978) China utilised to cultivate such a flourishing countryside was simple: progressive land reform. All four governments enacted laws that placed the majority of agricultural land directly into the hands of those who farmed it. In Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the post-WWII land reforms mostly brought an end to centuries of tenant farming and absentee landlordism. In China, where private land ownership did not exist, the 1978 reforms brought an end to the country’s catastrophic 20-year experiment with collective farming. (However, in China private land ownership was not reinstated; rather, households acquired renewable long-term contracts granting them “use rights”).
The great innovation of the East Asian land reforms was not the redistribution of land per se, but the equality of the distribution. Tens of thousands of Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean farming households received plots of roughly equal size, ranging between 1 and 3 hectares (with size differences accounting for variance in land quality). In China, the average farm size following the land reforms was less than a hectare. For context, the size of the average professional football field is approximately 0.75 hectares, and the average size of contemporary American farms is 187 hectares. The type of farming that emerged on the post-reform East Asian farms was highly labour-intensive and household-based. It has been described as a kind of ‘large-scale gardening’.
The logic of land reform
In all four East Asian states, the motivation behind land reform was not ideological. It was a move designed to achieve two goals that are vitally important for countries in the early stages of economic development: 1) overcoming the problem or rural rentierism to maximise agricultural productivity (measured in terms of crop yield per hectare), while 2) making the best possible use of a mostly rural labour force.
The problem of rural rentierism
Typically, the spectre of rural rentierism has hung over agriculture in countries at an earlier stage of economic development due to the prevalence of a combination of demographic pressure and unequal landholding patterns. For most of the modern era, developing countries have had growing populations and rising birth rates. The majority (or at least a large portion) of those populations have earned their living in farming. Except for the communist states, the owners of rural land have typically been far fewer in number than tenant farmers and landless labourers.
Such conditions prevailed in Japan, Taiwan, China and South Korea in the immediate aftermath of WWII. In Taiwan and South Korea, roughly three-quarters of the population earned a living in agriculture, while in Japan (which was more industrialised), just under half of the population were farmers. The populations of all three countries were set to grow rapidly, and landholding patterns were unequal. South Korea was the most unequal. In 1928, less than 4% of households owned 55% of farmland, while over 250,000 families were landless squatters. In Japan, by contrast, while smallholding predominated, the majority of the farming population were nevertheless tenants.
In such demographic conditions, agricultural outputs typically fall or stagnate as landlords favour rent extraction over increasing agricultural yields as a means of generating more revenue. The reason for this is a function of supply and demand. As the population grows, demand for cultivable land increases. However, the supply of farmland is fixed and bringing new land into cultivation requires substantial investment. Therefore, demand for farmland outstrips supply, driving up its price. In this situation, landlords realise it is far easier to increase their revenues by simply extracting higher rents from tenants rather than making investments in improving productivity. Even smallholders cease farming all or part of their plots and, instead, lease out their land to the growing landless population. Tenants become perpetually financially squeezed by high rents and have little incentive to invest any meagre post-tax profits in improving their productivity, since most of the financial benefits would accrue to their landlord.
Land reform in East Asia aimed to neuter the impulse toward rural rentierism by restructuring rural landholding patterns to remove the core incentive mechanism for rent-seeking. In its place, they created a new type of rural agricultural market that incentivised farming households to increase their income by producing more food rather than resorting to land accumulation and rent-seeking. Owning their own land, all farmers were now able to reap the full profits of any investments that they made in improving the land. Plot size limits meant that those profits could not be used to buy more land to rent out, thereby incentivising ploughing the profits back into increasing crop yields. And on a small farm of no more than 3 hectares, increasing crop yields is the only viable way to make more profit, since reducing labour costs substantially is not possible given the unsuitability of heavy mechanisation on such small plots. So, the land-owning farming household has only one option: grow as much food as physically possible on the available land.
The importance of maximising agricultural yields
Maximising agricultural yields is crucial for developing food self-sufficiency and avoiding the danger of ever-increasing dependency on food imports generated by stagnating or declining domestic food production. Food imports increase due to the growing gap between the overall domestic supply of food and the overall demand generated by population increase, which often follows an exponential pattern. Further down the line, when nations start to become richer and a sizeable middle class develops, the gap between domestic supply and demand for food typically widens as wealthier citizens demand greater quantities and a wider variety of food.
For developing countries, ever-increasing dependency on food imports undermines development efforts in several ways. First, importing food consumes a large amount of foreign currency that could have been used for importing higher-value goods of greater long-term importance for economic development. Instead, a substantial portion of foreign currency earned from exports is wasted on importing foodstuffs that could have been grown domestically. This could eventually lead to debt repayment problems if external debt is high, as occurred in Brazil in the 1980s. Secondly, poorer countries that are dependent on food imports are highly vulnerable to shocks in the global supply chain. For example, Egypt imported 60% of the wheat its citizens consumed in 2021. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, Egypt has suffered severe food price inflation due to a restriction in the supply of Ukrainian grain. Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea, in their early development, managed to successfully avoid the problems arising from dependency on food imports.
Best use of labour at the early stages of development
Alongside incentivising the maximisation of food production, small-scale household farming makes the best use of labour in an economy where the majority (or a plurality) of the population works in farming. This might sound counterintuitive within the paradigm of orthodox neoclassical economics – surely small-scale, low-tech, labour-intensive farming is an inefficient use of resources? However, it makes perfect sense within the particular conditions that have typically prevailed in countries at the earlier stages of economic development, when labour is cheap, plentiful and mostly rurally-based, and higher value-added jobs are few and do not exceed the rate of population growth. East Asian agricultural policy was designed to make the most of early-development labour conditions by developing a rural economic model that was highly labour-intensive but ensured that every unit of rural labour went into productive activities.
In the long run, as economies develop and move further up the value chain of goods and services, the proportion of the labour force employed in agriculture should reduce to single figures. For example, in the US, only 1.2% of the labour force is employed in farmwork. However, at earlier stages of development, where most of the pre-existing labour force is employed in agriculture and there is little work outside the sector, the best thing an economy can do is to make that agricultural labour force as productive as possible – which is precisely what the East Asian Four did.
Implementation
In all four East Asian countries, land reform occurred with remarkably little violence or social unrest. As the economist Joe Studwell argues in his 2014 work on East Asian economic development, How Asia Works, the key mechanism for ensuring the smooth implementation of the land reform legislation was popular participation via local land committees charged with overseeing the redistribution process. The Japanese were the first to introduce land committees in 1946. Comprising landlords, tenant farmers and smallholders, the local committees were granted legal powers to review land transfers and adjudicate disputes. Crucially, the committees were designed such that tenants and smallholders outnumbered landlords. As a result, almost all attempts to violate the land reform laws were quashed. In the longer term, there was no return to tenancy in Japan (or in Taiwan, which copied the Japanese model).
The importance of broad farmer participation in the land reform process is highlighted by South Korea. In South Korea, where there was little farmer participation and the government followed a much more centrally managed process, landlords managed to sell land outside the official channels, often to relatives or proxies. Furthermore, by the 1970s, tenancy had returned on a significant scale, affecting roughly a quarter of farmland. Nevertheless, South Korean land reform was ultimately an overall success, with farm ownership increasing from 10% of farm households in 1945 to 70% in 1964.
Results
As Studwell has shown, the transition to household agriculture in Japan, Taiwan, China, and South Korea resulted in highly productive farms, measured in terms of crop yield per hectare. In Japan, overall agricultural yields grew an impressive 3% every year from 1955 to 1970, leading to food self-sufficiency. In South Korea, after the government of General Park Chung Hee began giving more support to farmers from 1961, yields from rice paddies rose from an average of 3 tonnes per hectare in the 1950s to 5.3 tonnes per hectare by the 1970s, which was 50-100% more than in contemporary South-East Asia.
After switching to household farming, Chinese agriculture went from strength to strength. For example, overall yearly grain production rose from 305 million tonnes in 1978 to over 500 million tonnes by the late 1990s. At present, grain yields on small Chinese farms are 50% higher on average than the yields on large-scale American farms. Similarly, Chinese household farming has delivered huge gains in cash crops. For example, from 1978 to 1985, total sugar yields increased by 250%. In the 2010s, Chinese average yearly sugar yields were 75 tonnes per hectare, 40-50% higher than in the large plantations of the Philippines, where the soil and climatic conditions are more favourable.
Taiwan witnessed arguably the most dramatic results from household farming. Throughout the 1950s, yields of traditional crops such as sugar and rice increased by over 50%, while yields of specialist fruits and vegetables, such as mushrooms, bananas, and asparagus, doubled. Since the 1950s, small Taiwanese household farms have consistently produced on average 50% more sugar than large-scale plantations in the Philippines and Indonesia.
State Support for Farmers
While land reform provided the necessary structure to facilitate the flourishing of agriculture, the land reforms would not have been such a success – and could have failed –if the governments of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China had not paired their land reforms with a suite of supporting policies designed to fully actualise the latent benefits of land reform. These policies included:
Infrastructure investment – The East Asian Four all invested heavily in improving rural infrastructure, both general civil infrastructure – such as roads, bridges, the electricity grid and so on – and in developing agriculture-specific infrastructure, such as irrigation systems.
Rural credit – Governments established financial institutions to provide low-interest credit facilities and other financial products tailored to farming customers.
Research and training – The four East Asian governments made huge investments in agricultural research institutions and the provision of ‘extension’ workers, whose job it was to educate farmers on best practices and train them in the use of the latest technologies, techniques and seed varieties. Taiwan led in this regard, with 79 agricultural researchers per 100,000 individuals employed in agriculture.
Storage and marketing services – The governments made substantial investments in storage and transport facilities, agencies to help connect farmers to buyers, branding and promotion support, and the provision of high-quality market information.
Tariffs – While tariff policies varied in their magnitude and scope, all four of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China used tariffs to protect the domestic farming industry. However, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (although not China) later made the mistake of continuing – and indeed increasing – subsidies and protections for their agricultural sectors due to political pressures long after those policies had maximised their economic usefulness.
Benefits of rural prosperity
Through their agricultural policies, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China were able to do something unprecedented in East Asia: generate widespread rural prosperity. Household farms in the four East Asian countries were highly productive and consistently profitable, both through selling to protected domestic markets and exporting their surpluses. This rural wealth played a crucial role in the industrial development of the East Asian Four:
Rural household savings – In developing countries, capital markets tend to be underdeveloped, so savings form an important source of investment funds. The case was no different in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, where the savings of millions of farming households financed early domestic investments in factories.
Early source of foreign exchange – Notably, in Taiwan, agricultural productive capacity quickly outpaced domestic demand, and Taiwanese farmers began exporting their produce at scale. These food exports were a reliable source of foreign exchange at the beginning of the nation’s industrialisation journey.
Rural consumption – A substantial portion of the profits generated from the large crop yields of household farms led to the development of new demand in the countryside for manufactured goods, providing a large and ready market for emerging domestic manufacturers.
Rural entrepreneurship – Now that farmers were able to make consistent profits from farming, many chose to invest in establishing new businesses, mostly factories. Indeed, in Taiwan, it was the countryside that led the country’s early manufacturing drive. Between 1956 and 1966, manufacturing employment in rural Taiwan increased at a rate of 7.2% per year, substantially faster than the rate of increase in urban areas.
Social mobility – The emergence of a degree of rural prosperity allowed for the children of farming families to pursue careers that had hitherto been the preserve of a narrow group of urban elites, including key statesmen and industrialists who came from farming family backgrounds: In South Korea, President Park Chung Hee, who guided the country’s early industrialisation, and Chung Ju Yung, the founder of Hyundai; in Taiwan, Wang Yung-ching, the founder of Formosa Plastics Group, one of Taiwan’s largest and most valuable companies; In Japan, the founder of Honda, Soichiro Honda, and the founder of the antecedent to Toyota Industries, Sakichi Toyoda; in China: Lui Yonghao, the founder of New Hope Group, the biggest agribusiness company in China; Cao Dewang, the chairman of Fuyao Glass Industry Group, one of the world’s largest auto glass producers; and Li Hejun, the founder of Hanergy Group, a giant in the global thin-film solar technology sector.
Lack of forced rural to urban migration – The fact that the majority of rural people could now make a healthy living in agriculture meant that they were not compelled to leave the land and move to cities due to poverty. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, therefore, largely avoided the emergence of the large urban slums filled with impoverished ex-farmers that are ubiquitous across the developing world.
Land Reform in Syria’s Context
By now, the numerous benefits of adopting the East Asian agricultural model should be clear. But, to recapitulate, these benefits include: the quashing of rural rent-seeking, the attainment of food self-sufficiency alongside surpluses for export, the utilisation of available labour in the most valuable way at the early stages of development, and the creation of widespread rural prosperity. Moreover, the fact that the East Asian agricultural model was adopted by only four non-Western nations to ever climb to the summit of the industrial development ladder should, on its own, be enough to convince any nation seeking development and industrialisation of the merits of adopting the East Asian approach.
Nevertheless, a sceptic may question whether the East Asian model, despite its many merits, is suitable for contemporary Syria. Syria in 2025 is not Japan or Taiwan or South Korea or China in the middle third of the 20th century. Syria has its unique conditions and challenges, including the devastation caused by 14 years of war, and it is not possible to copy, play-for-play, the approach of any of the East Asian Four.
While that is true, what Syria can and should do is to take the blueprint, the model, the core principles, the fundamentals of East Asian agricultural policy – equitable land redistribution and state support for agriculture – and apply them to the Syrian context, with all its idiosyncrasies and distinctive challenges. That is precisely what the government of Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek did when it looked to Japan for inspiration, and what successive South Korea governments did when they studied Japan and Taiwan, and what the government of Deng Xiaoping did when it sought to learn from the successes of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
The East Asian Four started in very different economic, social and political positions. Japan in 1946 was a (recently militarily defeated) East Asian superpower fairly far along the path of industrial development. Despite having a large rural population, the majority of its people lived in towns and cities. The country had already experimented with land reform, which was reflected in the preponderance of small and medium-sized landlordism. South Korea, a former Japanese colony, was a desperately poor, highly unequal, and overwhelmingly agrarian society with little industry to speak of. Taiwan, another poor former Japanese colony, was also subject to the exceptional demographic pressures of absorbing one million Chinese Nationalist exiles from the mainland in the late 1940s. China, also poor and agrarian, was subject to radically different political and economic conditions. It was a one-party communist state with a centrally planned economy, where private land ownership did not exist and huge-scale, collective farming predominated.
Nevertheless, despite differences in pre-existing conditions, the governments of all four East Asian states aspired to the same goal: rapid industrial development. And they faced similar core challenges: the spectre of rural rent-seeking and food shortages, rapidly growing populations, and the bulk of their labour force working in agriculture. As such, all four governments had the foresight to equally distribute farmland, knowing that the agricultural productivity gains and labour force optimisation that would accrue from such a redistribution were the sine qua non of industrialisation.
There are few structural reasons why Syria cannot or should not follow in their footsteps. To start, poverty is rife in the Syrian countryside, as it was in East Asia. Rural poverty has only been exacerbated by war. As in East Asia, Syria has a growing population and will witness a substantial post-war population bounce. While land reforms before the 2000s resulted in lowering the proportion of tenant farmers, various types of non-owner-operated farms remain widespread, and there is a substantial disparity in farm sizes. According to data from 2001, the average size of irrigated holdings varied greatly from region to region, from 10.5 hectares in Hassakeh and 8.9 hectares in Raqqa to only 0.8 hectares and 0.9 hectares in Suweida and Tartus, respectively.
The main structural difference between Syria and the East Asian Four at the start of their agricultural reforms is the composition of the labour force. Accurate and up-to-date statistics are hard to come by, but one recent study places the proportion of the Syrian workforce employed in agriculture at over 20%. While this figure likely excludes male informal labourers, women, and minors, it is substantially lower than that of Japan, where roughly 47% of the workforce was employed in agriculture in 1946. As such, Syria does find itself in a trickier position than the East Asian states concerning labour. At least a plurality of the country’s cheap and under-utilised labour do not work on farms, but find themselves in semi-employment in various low-value services industries in the cities.
Challenges to Land Reform in Syria
The Syrian countryside has been ravaged by war, and much agricultural infrastructure has either been destroyed, damaged, or has fallen into disrepair. But the destruction of rural Syria is all the more reason to invest generously in reviving the countryside and the rural economy. It is important to remember that South Korea initiated its programme of agricultural reforms in 1953, just after the end of the Korean War, which killed and wounded millions and inflicted immense infrastructure damage. Similarly, Japan initiated its agricultural reforms one year after its defeat in WWII. Furthermore, there is a body of research to show that smallholders and family farms play a key role in post-war rural economic recovery, far more than large farms. This should incentivise any government to support progressive land reform and household farming in the aftermath of war.
Unlike the East Asian states, Syria faces acute problems of water scarcity, which will require substantial investment in new water-saving technologies. But this should not be a barrier to following East Asian-style land reform. Investment in advanced irrigation and water conservation technologies (as well as a movement away from thirsty crops, such as cotton) is necessary for Syria, regardless of whether land reform is enacted or not. Moreover, there is plenty of research to show that small farms are more water-efficient than large farms. And it is certainly more effective to apply new technologies in a context in which all farmers are owner-farmers, incentivised to use the technology as efficiently as possible, rather than in one where rent-seeking landlordism is prevalent.
For Syria, the most daunting challenge to the successful implementation of land reform will be land disputes. Much land has been stolen over the past 14 years by militia members and criminal gangs, some of whom are the leaders of powerful tribes. The illegal seizure of land has compounded rural Syria’s longstanding problem with the prevalence of informal and/or insecure landholding and tenancy contracts. In these conditions, attempts at land reform would almost certainly be met with opposition, and disputes would likely erupt as rival groups stake their claims. At present, the Syrian government does not have the capacity to review and rationalise all landholding and tenancy contracts, or to successfully mediate rural land disputes directly or through the land tenancy committee model used by the East Asian Four. Indeed, the government does not currently control large swathes of Syrian territory. As such, comprehensive land reform may not be possible in the near future.
Nevertheless, the current lack of state capacity should not be a barrier to pursuing East Asian-style agricultural policies once the state has the ability to do so. A flourishing countryside is imperative for Syria’s economic prosperity - and the only tried and tested route to that flourishing in the post-war period is the one laid out by Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China.