Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [200]
All of these numbers that I have quoted so far for Kanama are average numbers, which conceal inequalities. Some people owned larger farms than others, and that inequality increased from 1988 to 1993. Let’s define a “very big” farm as larger than 2.5 acres, and a “very small” farm as smaller than 0.6 acre. (Think back to Chapter 1 to appreciate the tragic absurdity of those numbers: I mentioned there that in Montana a 40-acre farm used to be considered necessary to support a family, but even that is now inadequate.) Both the percentage of very big farms and the percentage of very small farms increased between 1988 and 1993, from 5 to 8% and from 36 to 45% respectively. That is, Kanama farm society was becoming increasingly divided between the rich haves and the poor have-nots, with decreasing numbers of people in the middle. Older heads of households tended to be richer and to have larger farms: those in the age ranges 50-59 and 20-29 years old had average farm sizes of 2.05 acres and only 0.37 acre respectively. Of course, family size was larger for the older household heads, so they needed more land, but they still had three times more land per household member than did young household heads.
Paradoxically, off-farm income was earned disproportionately by owners of large farms: the average size of farms that did earn such income was 1.3 acres, compared to only half an acre for farms lacking such income. That difference is paradoxical because the smaller farms are the ones whose household members have less farmland per person to feed themselves, and which thus need more off-farm income. That concentration of off-farm income on the larger farms contributed to the increasing division of Kanama society between haves and have-nots, with the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer. In Rwanda, it’s supposedly illegal for owners of small farms to sell any of their land. In fact, it does happen. Investigation of land sales showed that owners of the smallest farms sold land mainly when they needed money for an emergency involving food, health, lawsuit costs, bribes, a baptism, wedding, funeral, or excessive drinking. In contrast, owners of large farms sold for reasons such as to increase farm efficiency (e.g., selling a distant parcel of land in order to buy a parcel nearer to the farmhouse).
The extra off-farm income of larger farms allowed them to buy land from smaller farms, with the result that large farms tended to buy land and become larger, while small farms tended to sell land and become smaller. Almost no large farm sold land without buying any, but 35% of the smallest farms in 1988, and 49% of them in 1993, sold without buying. If one breaks down land sales according to off-farm income, all farms with off-farm income bought land, and none sold land without buying; but only 13% of farms lacking off-farm income bought land, and 65% of them sold land without buying. Again, note the paradox: already-tiny farms, which desperately needed more land, in fact became smaller, by selling land in emergencies to large farms financing their purchases with off-farm income. Remember again that what I term “large farms” are large only by Rwanda standards: “large” means “larger than a mere 1 or 2 acres.”
Thus, at Kanama most people were impoverished, hungry, and desperate, but some people were more impoverished, hungry, and desperate than others, and most people were becoming more desperate while a few were becoming less desperate. Not surprisingly, this situation gave rise to frequent serious conflicts that the parties involved could not resolve by themselves, and that they either referred to traditional village conflict mediators or (less often) brought to the courts. Each year, households reported