Longer description of your proposed project

Oligarchic land ownership keeps farmers poor. Dismantling these feudal systems has worked in the past to help communities and nations get on the path to economic development. I plan to make direct land purchases from landowners who don't work the land, then immediately transfer to the current landless farmers who work that land.

The modern ‘feudal lord’ isn’t living in a castle somewhere. He works a desk job in the city, buying satellite imagery to help monitor the output of his farmhands. He likely inherited his land and gets a small supplementary income from it, but many of these landowners want to get out of the landownership game. It’s too much work for too little gain. The problem is that everyone else inherited their land, too. They all want to sell - just not for too low a price, because it does bring in that extra income. This means nobody can afford to sell.

Meanwhile, this arrangement is hard on the farmer who actually works the land. Rents to the landowner are steadily around 50% of the income of the land (for economic reasons I won’t go into here), with plot sizes for the tenant farmers just large enough for subsistence living. Many tenant farmers have worked the land for generations, but they don't own the land and have no hope of ever doing so. So they hike the 2-3km from the nearby village to work every day. These farmers know the land. They see many opportunities to increase yields, but they aren’t allowed to because the improvements aren’t legible to the landowners.

The current situation around the world is that landowners are stuck with farmland capital they can’t liquidate, and the farmers themselves are stuck working at subsistence levels with no path out. If the landowners could transform their land into liquid capital, they’d be free to invest the money. If the tenant farmers owned their land outright, they could make their own decisions about what to plant and how. Historically, this kind of reform has resulted in crop yields from 2-8x as much as under the feudal ownership model. The challenge is how to go from a feudal system to a modern one.

This question isn't new. The issue of “land reform” has been a stable demand for centuries, often as the centerpiece in the demands of revolutionaries. Most attempts at land reform are unsuccessful, because legacy landowners don’t benefit from having their land directly transferred by the government to someone else. For historically unique reasons land reform worked in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan – and it directly preceded economic development in each of those countries. Land reform in Indochina and the Philippines was not successful, and economic development in those countries didn’t take off.

I propose to solve this problem by purchasing land from landowners – thereby freeing up capital for them – then dividing and transferring that land to the farmers who already work the land. This will be done in a single step (for legal reasons most countries don’t allow foreigners to own land), after planting but before harvest (to ensure farmers don’t have to go into debt to fund their initial planting season).

What I’m proposing is a method of land redistribution – land reform – that will be voluntary to both parties in the transaction. For that reason, I’m hoping it will avoid the traditional objections to land reform, while providing a stable path to economic development for the affected communities. While the initial capital expense is relatively high, my hope is that it will be a one-time transfer that restructures the underlying economic order in low-income communities, allowing them to grow into middle-income communities and beyond.

My plan is to start small, with 1-3 farms (depending on how much capital I can raise) and follow the progress of those farms (and the affected farmers) compared to their near and distant neighbors.

I will begin by focusing on small island nations in the Lesser Antilles (Caribbean), where a few hundred hectares will represent a significant percentage of the nation's farmland. The project is expected to have a large enough impact on these small nations to be measurable in GDP and other official metrics, in addition to local surveys of farm output and farmer flourishing. There may also be some contribution from reinvestment of the land purchase price from the former landowner, which I plan to track.

This project is designed to return a quantitative estimate of principles that have previously only been inferred qualitatively in the development literature (or where confounding factors introduce uncertainty about quantitative measures).

I plan to publish my results as I go. Once I can demonstrate that this approach is effective, I’ll seek additional funding to roll out charity-driven land reform at scale, possibly focusing on other small nations to increase confidence and quantitative precision.

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

I have a PhD and a background in clinical research that I think will make me uniquely suited for determining whether this intervention works or not. My clinical research work focuses on developing treatments that alleviate toxicity from the side effects of cancer therapy. This means we put a lot of thought into how to measure whether an intervention is successful or not. In my experience, people often focus on metrics that aren’t important to the target population (surrogate endpoints), while ignoring much more relevant metrics. While lowering a lab value may be important, no patient comes into the clinic asking their doctor to lower their triglycerides. Therefore, it's important to directly ask the subject, “Do you feel better off than before the intervention?” This also applies to the development efforts.

I work in a small startup pharmaceutical company – including a US team of myself and three other people. This means I have a lot of experience working independently. When something needs to be done, there is no ‘expert’ who specializes in that thing, there’s just me. I’m primarily responsible for drafting the protocols, as well as managing the day-to-day operations of complex, multi-million dollar clinical trials.

This project will require similar expertise. It will require research to determine the appropriate target country to start in. In addition, I want to ensure the results are interpretable as either successful or not, which means ensuring the follow-up for the farmers is careful and useful.

The actual land transfer will require coordination among the landowner, farmers, local legal counsel, a local guide, and surveyors to ensure proper distribution. This will require vetting of contacts in low-income countries. I’m comfortable working internationally, including in low-income countries. I am also a thoroughly experienced interviewer, and have been a key decision-maker for our company in new hires as well as hiring contract work.

In preparation for eventual funding, I’ve been making contacts and conducting interviews with people working in economic development in India, the Philippines, Kenya, Honduras, and Mexico. I’ve been surprised at how consistent their feedback has been about the feudal land ownership models in these countries, each with their own regional variations. I’ve been working my way through the academic literature. I also have an open dialogue with a development economist in this field.

Other ways I can learn about you

ACX commenter handle: SCLMLW

LinkedIN profile: www.linkedin.com/in/mark-webb-phd-09489148/

Company website: OnQualityRx.com - you can find a short bio of me under "Who We Are" > "Research & Management"

How much money do you need?

$5,000 to $15,000 – this will fund research to prepare for my first land purchase, but it won’t fund the purchase itself. Hopefully, I can use these initial funds to line up my first land purchase and make the project attractive to larger investors/donors.

$250,000 – this should be enough to make the first land transfer. I know this is way more than what ACX is looking to spend on mini-grants. I’d be very interested in discussing my plans with oracular funders who want to take a chance on a larger venture, though.

$1M+ – the eventual goal is to demonstrate that charity-driven land reform is effective enough to begin rolling it out at scale.

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

$5,000-$15,000

90% probability I will be able to identify one or more land purchase opportunities, with supporting documentation and plans for how to implement both the purchase and the follow-up/measurement protocols once sufficient funding for a land purchase is acquired.

$250,000

75% probability I’m able to make the purchase at all. (Lower probability for any specific jurisdiction, but if it doesn’t work out in one location/country, I can try others until it works.)

Conditional on making the purchase: 80% probability the intervention will be measurably successful at making the lives of the farmers themselves better. 55% probability the net effect on other locals will be positive. 5% probability we’ll be able to show a measurable improvement in economic indicators with just one farm.

$1M+

Difficult to assess. If the net effect from the land purchase isn't positive, I won't seek expansion (barring unforeseen circumstantial complications). Conditional on initial land purchase demonstrating farmer improvement: 60% probability of demonstrating broader local economic improvements from the intervention.