Membership Desertion as an Adjustment Process on Honduran Agrarian Reform Enterprises

Abstract

thus incapable of improving rural productivity or solving serious distributional problems.' In the Honduran debate, pervasive membership desertion from agrarian reform enterprises is frequently cited by reform critics as empirical evidence of inefficiency and decline within the reform program enterprises. This desertion is generally blamed on various collective action problems of cooperative organization, such as organizational infighting, labor shirking, and corruption.2 Even the agrarian reform proponents within Honduras seem to accept membership desertion as evidence of reform-sector inefficiency and retreat to arguments about the social and political benefits of reducing rural tensions or the efficiency prospects of dividing reformsector lands into individual parcels. These tactics are understandable given the compelling logic behind membership desertion as an indicator of enterprise inefficiency. In essence, the argument is that if the rural landless, who are the poorest of the rural poor, struggle long and hard for access to land, only to abandon these cooperative enterprises in large numbers, then the viability of these enterprises as production units must be highly suspect.3 The only task that remains for reform critics then is to cite recent estimates by the Honduran National Agrarian Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) of the 20%-40% membership decline in the 2,400 agrarian reform enterprises incorporated in Honduras between 1968 and 1984,4 and a key argument about the efficiency and equity failure of the Honduran agrarian reform is complete.