And life for peasants is getting better, albeit not nearly as fast as it is for Maputo's bankers and restaurateurs.
Another problem is a lack of roads, which raises the cost of seeds, tools and fertiliser, and makes it harder for peasants to get their crops to market.
ECONOMIST: Facing famine, Ethiopia appeals urgently for food aid
The Zapatista uprising began in January 1994, when the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army, led by a man known only as "Subcommandante Marcos" declared war on the central government in an effort to gain improved living conditions and better rights for indigenous Indian peasants in the southern Chiapas region.
In the high altiplano, poor peasants depend for much of their water on the slow melting of snow.
It provides social services, as well as spiritual sustenance, for millions of conservative peasants and townspeople in Anatolia, Turkey's heartland.
And as Congo crumbles, it grows harder to plunder: operations at Ituri's vast Kilomoto gold mine, for example, have virtually ceased since local peasants started digging up its airstrip and panning the dirt for ore.
People who a few years ago were peasants now work for multinationals, live in tidy flats with big-screen televisions and, like parents everywhere, worry about the education of their children.
It has also paid peasants more than the law obliged for their land.
Several years ago, in return for taking in some of Tawa's peasants relocated as part of a poverty-alleviation scheme, it was given rights to the mountainous estate.
Wealthier peasants may welcome the subsidy, but for poorer ones having to pay even a reduced share of hospital expenses still makes treatment unaffordable.
Peasants fled from soldiers and vagabonds foraging for food, the urban middle classes floundered, and the surviving towns and cities, barely hanging on, could no longer protect the countryside and its farms.
Peasants have been legally trading land-use rights for years.
They gave peasants the right to own land and to work it for their own benefit rather than as part of the traditional feudal commune.
The straightness of his back came from something else: that on his third attempt at escape from prison camp he was beaten senseless, and his skull and neck broken, by two Breton peasants with pitchforks, and was invalided out in exchange for a U-boat commander.
This problem of landless peasants is likely to grow as more land is set aside for urban and industrial development.
It also calls for an increase in central-government handouts to rural areas, to make up for their loss of revenue as a result of reforms intended to reduce peasants' tax burdens.
Haier is perhaps best known for the story of how, in the mid-1990s, they unexpectedly recognized the use of their washing machines by peasants in Sichuan province to make their fruits and vegetables more attractive for the newly emerging free markets, and then developed softer agitators to deliver on that need.
Mr Meles is said to be pondering the idea of promoting private property rights, but the conventional wisdom among his officials is that, if peasants could sell their land, they would do so immediately, drink the proceeds and head for the cities, where they would become an unsightly and potentially disruptive underclass.
Between 1998 and 2000, a senseless war with neighbouring Eritrea cost a fortune and prised many of the strongest hands off hoes and on to rifles. (In Eritrea, the aftermath has been even bleaker: 2.3m people now need food aid, out of a population of only 3m.) Ethiopian peasants are also burdened with taxes on the land they lease from the state, and levies for clinics, schools and roads.
ECONOMIST: Facing famine, Ethiopia appeals urgently for food aid
Juchitan, a city known for its dominant women, has a tradition of indigenous intellectualism and in 1981 elected the Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students to its city government.
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