Mongolians test alien idea: Privatizing the land
By Jehangir S. Pocha International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2005

BAYANZURH TOUCHO, Mongolia: Before the freewheeling 1960s, before Mao led China to revolution in 1949 and before the Soviets took control of this country in 1921, Mongolia was already one giant commune.

"Land here never belonged to anyone; it belonged to everyone," said Davasuren, 50, a self-described "retired nomad" in this tiny village 30 kilometers, or 20 miles, south of Ulan Bator, the capital. Like many Mongolians, he uses only one name.

Despite the reputation for violent acquisitiveness that Mongolians acquired when Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde forged the world's greatest land empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, Mongolia developed as a communal land-sharing system long before capitalists and Communists clashed over the principles of property and ownership.

Every herding clan led its animals across a specific seasonal grazing route established by the clan's ancestors, and the right to this path was respected by others through an unwritten code based on honor and mutual cooperation.

But as the modern world has encroached on this remote country, Mongolia has been trying to reinvent itself as a free market democracy.

Many local politicians and economists now say that Mongolia's traditional land regime is the core cause of its backwardness and want to replace it with a Westernized property management system under which land would be parceled out and privatized.

"Our plan is, every citizen gets some land free once, in one area," said Myagmarsuren Dechinlkhundev, consultant to the government's standing committee on environment and rural development in Ulan Bator.

In cities it might be just 0.3 hectares, or more than 0.7 acres, he said, but in rural areas it could be about 0.75 hectares.

"Doing this in rural areas," he said, "faces more difficulties, but we're determined to go ahead. Private land is the base for a free economy."

That is a view rooted in the developmental model that a Peruvian economist, Hernando De Soto, outlined.

De Soto, in his book, "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else," contends that the problem often "is that people just aren't sure of what they own."

"Everybody who feels they have something of value," he said, is free to use it in trade, "either mortgage it, lease it, sell it, develop it, whatever."

But while this prescription made sense for agrarian countries in which feudalism denied peasants ownership of the land they tilled, its economic efficacy seems less obvious in Mongolia, where more than a million of the 2.5 million people are herders.

Though they may not know it, Davasuren and his wife are experiments in Mongolia's land privatization initiative, and things are not going too well for them.

When the government first offered them a plot of four-tenths of a hectare in Bayanzurh Toucho in a new community built for nomads agreeing to be settled down, they grabbed it without questions. But now Davasuren says that while he appreciates owning some land, he is not sure what to do with it.

"We're trying to farm - grow things," he said, gesturing to the small rows of cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes that line his fence. But it's "not easy or enjoyable" for wandering nomads to learn how to farm, he said.

Although Davasuren and his wife have been "settled" for more than a year, they say they still cannot get used to the idea of living in a concrete or brick home. So they have simply pitched their old gher or yurt - the round canvas and felt tent used by nomads - in the middle of their plot.

Such discomfort over surrendering traditional ways of living was given expression in November 2002 when hundreds of farmers and nomads protested the government's land privatization by driving tractors and marching into Ulan Bator's Sukhbaatar Square.

Although the government backed off from some of its more controversial proposals, both the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, whose candidate, Nambariin Enkhbayar, was just elected Mongolia's president, and the Democratic Party, whose leader, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, is currently prime minister, still support land privatization.

Perhaps land privatization makes sense in the city, said Narangerel, a nomad trying to continue with her time-honored occupation despite growing obstacles. "But in the countryside it would create huge problems. How would we take our animals grazing?"

Because sheep and goats graze vast areas clean of vegetation within weeks, herders need to keep moving onto fresh pastures. That is why few permanent settlements have ever taken root in Mongolia, and in transitory "villages," people just pitch their ghers along their grazing routes.

Sitting inside Narangerel's gher is surprisingly comfortable. A wood-burning fire in the center keeps the home warm through Mongolia's bitter winters, and a carved wooden chest of drawers stands between beds laden with sheepskin.

It is a life Narangerel says she knows and likes and that she doesn't need or want change.

Sentiments like that seem to embarrass planners like Myagmarsuren somewhat. They say nomadism is backward, and they do not deny that the intended land reform is a backhanded way of moving Mongolia's scattered population into cities.

"Urbanization is linked to progress," said Dorjnamjim Lhaajav, the country manager in Ulan Bator for the International Finance Corporation, a unit of the World Bank.

Today, many young Mongolians seem happy to swap their traditional dels, or long silk shirts worn over baggy trousers, for stylish black leather outfits in rapidly modernizing Ulan Bator. But many others, like Narangerel, still shudder at the thought of giving up their life on the plains to live in a cookie-cutter apartment.

To ease such concerns, Myagmarsuren insists that "traditional pasturelands will not be privatized" and the herders' lives would remain undisturbed.

But already "more than 30 percent of public land has been leased to private mining companies" that have invested massively in Mongolia and its rich resources over the last few years, Dorjnamjim said. That is causing "herders a lot of trouble because in many places mining leases cut into pasture lands."

Since only 30 percent of Mongolia, the size of Western Europe, is geologically mapped, many herders say that the government's real goal is to get them off land it wants to explore and lease out to mining companies, who produce more than half of Mongolia's industrial output and nearly all of its pollution.

But herders are hardly proving to be friends of the earth. After Soviet-era controls on how many animals people could own were lifted, Mongolia's livestock population jumped from 25 million to 35 million.

This resulted in such massive overgrazing and desertification that the prime minister, Elbegdorj, recently acknowledged that Mongolia's desert area was expanding "by more than 20 to 30 kilometers every year." This gives rise to massive sandstorms that often darken the skies as far away as North America.

Such concerns seemed far away in the cozy warmth of Narangerel's gher. Her child lay swaddled in sheets on one of the beds, and outside the new puppy she was training to be a watchdog whined for its dinner.

She does not care if this is not very modern. "I don't like UB," she said, referring to Ulan Bator. "I want to die here, in the country, where it is beautiful."

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