Masoud Ghaffari; Habib Rezazadeh
Abstract
First: The current water crisis in Iran is the product of years of inappropriate decisions and management, which occurred due to the increase in water demand from the country's water resources. Agrarian reform policy and the issue of land. The result was the fragmentation of agricultural land, which, ...
Read More
First: The current water crisis in Iran is the product of years of inappropriate decisions and management, which occurred due to the increase in water demand from the country's water resources. Agrarian reform policy and the issue of land. The result was the fragmentation of agricultural land, which, along with the introduction of deep and semi-deep well exploitation technology, led to the digging of wells by small-scale farmers and landowners and the increase in underground water exploitation; because the easiest way for every person who owned land was to dig a well.
Second: New institutionalism does not consider the economic future and the development of societies as a future with unlimited choices; considering that property rights are among the effective institutions; therefore, the policies that target the property rights of the society create major changes in the society. Land reform is a type of institutional change that is carried out by the government to transform the existing ownership structure and transform it into a desirable structure. Therefore, by using the new institutionalism, we can see the historical impact of land reforms, which was the policy of the government institution in changing and redefining the institution of land ownership; it highlighted the current water crisis.
Third: Before land reforms, Iran's land system had three characteristics: 1- the concentration of land in the hands of a number of absent owners; 2- Shareholding as the dominant form of tenancy and 3- The prevalence of old and primitive techniques in production was determined. About the type of ownership of Iranian villages at that time, the information related to land reforms shows that 6,885 were in the care of religious institutions, 1,535 villages and parts of the other 245 were owned by the government and the royal institution also owned 2,167 villages and their lands. These institutions owned about 20% of the villages. In addition, Iran had 2,250 private owners, each of whom had more than one village; these people owned 11,740 villages. About 20 percent of the villages were for rural farmers and the remaining 38 percent belonged to 320,000 owners. However, following the changes in the ownership institution, the ratio of independent farmers to the rural population, which was less than 5% before the land reforms, reached 76% of the rural population after the land reforms. Although agrarian reforms increased the number of land-owning farmers, they could not give them enough land to become capable and self-reliant farmers. Because the average area of the farm in 1353 was 6.6 hectares and 37% of the land was in water shortage condition
Fourth: The issue of land and the institution of ownership after the Islamic revolution
At the beginning of the victory of the Islamic revolution, due to the expectations created among the rural strata and farmers within the framework of the slogans of the revolution era, in the rural areas, the conflict over land occupation had occupied everyone; In addition to local encroachments, the new regime tried to implement a series of land distribution policies. These land division policies culminated in the redistribution of what was mostly government land and the setting of ownership ceilings in each locality, which led to the redistribution of some of the remaining private land to large landowners. The result of the land division policy of the 1980s was to once again destroy the remnants of large-scale private capitalist agriculture and convert it into numerous small farms. At the same time as the fragmentation and scattering of agricultural lands, which was the result of land reforms and changes in the ownership institution; we see an increase in the number of well rings; the new owners began to dig wells for their newly acquired lands using the new well drilling technology. As a result of these events, the number of wells in the country increased from about 47,000 wells in the water year 1972-1973 to about 763,000 wells in the water year 2011-2012, and the amount of harvesting also increased from 9 billion cubic meters to more than 47 billion cubic meters. Thus, during this period, the number of wells has increased 16 times and the amount of harvests has increased more than 5 times
Fifth: Before the land reforms, the number of small farmers was 320,000, who, together with 2,250 large owners, owned 60% of the agricultural land, and the average land of farmers was more than 20 hectares, the number of underground water resource exploitation wells was less than 40,000 wells, and the amount of exploitation was also It is less than 9,000 cubic meters But in 1979, when the number of small owners increased to 1,601,000 operators, the number of wells increased to more than 70,000 wells, and in 1988, when the number of operators increased to 2,800,000 and the average area of agricultural land is less than 3 hectares, the number of wells 221,691 and the amount of underground water extraction is 32,599 cubic meters and in 2003, when the number of users is 3,480,729, the number of well rings is 468,049 and the amount of extraction is 44,895 cubic meters; In the early 1990s, with the number of 3,359,409 operators, we see more than 763,664 wells and the extraction rate of 47,182 cubic meters.
