Final answer:
Land reform is challenging due to economic pressures from plantation agriculture, historical legacies of colonial land tenure systems, rigid social structures, and inequalities in wealth and power. These factors contribute to market disruption, entrenched class divisions, and conflict over land rights when reforms are attempted.
Step-by-step explanation:
Land reform has been difficult to enact for a variety of social, economic, and political reasons. On the economic front, large plantation agriculture operations, which are highly competitive and profitable, benefit from economies of scale that smaller farms cannot match. This creates market pressure to maintain large farms and makes it challenging to redistribute land to poorer populations without disrupting the export economy. For instance, when land reform occurred in Zimbabwe, the economic balance was significantly disturbed. Furthermore, historical factors such as the legacy of colonialism have entrenched a rigid land tenure system with deeply rooted class divisions, leading to violent conflicts over land rights and reforms.
In many countries, the social structure and distribution of power pose significant challenges to land reform. This is reflected in Russia's history, where rigid social hierarchies and the power of the landowning nobility inhibited any change that would endanger their status. Similarly, in Bolivia, the distribution of land was extremely unequal, necessitating a government-led Agrarian Reform Decree after spontaneous peasant action.
Lastly, the intersection of agriculture, policy, and wealth distribution illustrates the complexity of land reform. Where agriculture is the primary industry, ownership of land equates to wealth, often forming an oligarchy alongside a disenfranchised peasantry. Moreover, the introduction of High Yielding Variety (HRV) seeds during the Green Revolution ended up further enriching landlords and impoverishing landless peasants, underlining the difficulty in achieving equitable land distribution and reform.