Land Market Based Interventions in LAC: Protierras in Bolivia

1. Land Market Based Interventions in LAC: Protierras in Bolivia Martín Valdivia

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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?

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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?