Anti-poverty or anti-poor?: The world bank's market-led agrarian reform experiment in the Philippines

After seven years of implementation, the results are in: the World Bank's experiment in market-led agrarian reform in the Philippines has resulted in anti-poor outcomes. The evidence shows that wealth and power transfers in the project sites have followed four broad patterns-all. owing in one basic direction: intra-elite/elite-to-elite, state-to-elite, foreign donor-to-elite and poor-to-elite. Alongside its clear failure in this specific sense, the experiment has been a boon for the cause of anti-reform, strengthening the manoeuvres of anti-reform forces, while undermining the redistributive potentials not only of the present, but also of any future state land reform law in the country.