An important caveat to my incessant plugging of government-led agrarian reform

This article by GRAIN reminds me that merely increasing farmer access to agricultural inputs, like seeds or fertilizer, leaves much to be desired in terms of improving well-being of small farmers. First off, if land is so unequally distributed that small farmers have barely enough to feed their families, and large farmers have so much land that they can unduly influence policies and markets, then input subsidies are likely to benefit large farmers, while doing little good for smaller farmers (and in some cases leaving the latter with more debt from buying the inputs than income from increased production). Secondly, inorganic fertilizers, while not bad in themselves, can really screw up farming systems if you're not careful. Basically synthetic fertilizers are inorganic, acidic salts that provide certain important nutrients for a plant, while doing nothing to improve long-term soil health. If you're not constantly adding organic matter to the soil through manure or compost, using inorganic fertilizer destroys soil life, which in the long term leaves the soil more vulnerable to erosion and less able to provide a good environment for crop plant roots. Finally, a dependence on expensive imported synthetic fertilizers leaves a country very vulnerable to the fluctuations of international markets, which from one year to another can drastically affect the country's economy, food security, and government budget.

So the moral of the story is that, if agrarian reform programs don't include land redistribution as a major component, then other reforms, like improving access to credit or inputs, can end up hurting small farmers instead of helping them.