Land Market Based Interventions in LAC: Protierras in Bolivia

Martín Valdivia

Protierras in Bolivia• Objective: ProTierras-DA aims at helping poor, landless get

access to land with the capacity to achieve their productive potential– Market based, even involving community land– Spatial development approach

• Program has two key components:– Land acquisition component (CAT for its initials in Spanish) –

reimbursable, not only land purchases– Supplementary investments component (CIC)

• Landless or small poor farmers need to get organized in producers´ associations (APs)– Groups are endogenously formed– By now, they average between 15-25 families

• APs are the direct beneficiaries that assume the debt for the CAT and receive/implement the CIC investment plan

Protierras in Bolivia• CIC includes:

– infrastructure for water management, – commercialization infrastructure, services and others, – financing of technical assistance services

• Current programming assumes a total support per family of US $ 6,000– 40% of those funds for CAT, reimbursable– 60% for the CIC– Initial steps have shown the need to be flexible about it

• Program in pilot phase:– Work restricted to in 3 municipalities in Santa Cruz province: Mineros,

Pailón, Charagua– Program has been introduced in all municipalities and “capitanías”

through participatory workshops– 10 APs will have start receiving the money this year– Another 20 groups in the pipeline:

• Individual clearance (ID, poverty, no debts)• Legal clearance to land acquisition (titling efforts not so developed)

Evaluating Protierras• Key question: What's the impact of this kind of intervention on

the different measures of welfare of beneficiaries and the intensity of land use?– Are the $ 6k per family enough to sustainably increase their

agricultural productivity and income?, compare to other income generating interventions (rural roads, specialized services such as credit, TA, etc)

– Does the program's procedures guarantee CIC to include best investment plan?

– Does strength of social ties between AP members condition the impact of the program on the productivity and welfare of beneficiaries?

• Other important questions:– Is productive land abundant in this environment so that project can

focus on truly unused land? (connection to titling project)– Does the program's eligibility criteria exclude too many of the

poor/socially excluded?– Are APs going to remain working as a unit or separate in individual

parcels? How does that decision affect the effects of the program?– What would be the effect of the program on gender equity?

Methodological issues for evaluation

• Building a baseline and control group– Changes over time are not enough to establish the program's impact

– We do not have the full list of beneficiaries for the next 2 years

– Household survey is crucial for BL but not enough to capture distributional impacts

• Need village-level surveys, census-like registering of the previous situation of land involved

• Ideal situation: randomize timing of benefits among those that finish the pipeline– Treatment and control groups are likely to have same observed

characteristics, incentives, drive

– Very efficient in terms of survey costs

– Politically unfeasible

Methodological issues for evaluation II

• What is feasible for evaluating the pilot?– Match intervened communities with observably equivalent

communities outside but nearby the three municipalities (census data)• Challenge 1: how to identify those families in control areas

that would have become beneficiaries?– Need to interview non-beneficiaries within treatment localities

(increasing costs)– Sampling needs to stratify among current beneficiaries, those in the

pipeline, and the rest of the community– Estimate a participation model and use it to predict those in control

areas more likely to become beneficiaries• Challenge 2: many of the most important effects come in the

long-run– Low chance to sustain a control group for too long– Demands clear and early definition of timing of expected impacts

Methodological issues for evaluation III

• Opportunities– Randomize variants of the intervention even during pilot

• Specific incremental interventions associated to social capital formation, gender equity at AP level

• Not too intrusive to projects´ main goal

• Clear example of how evaluation strategy can timely help implementation

– Plan expansion consistent with an evaluation strategy:• Not too large so that we can manage pressure to intervene in control areas

• Randomize communities included in next round of expansion

• Consider more variants of the basic interventions– Provision mechanisms for technical assistance

– What to do with the organization of the APs?