But several hundred million Africans remain little more than landless tenants of the state, in the eyes of national laws.
Fearnside believes the large cattle ranchers, responsible for most of past deforestation, will gain far more than landless labourers who sit at the bottom of Brazil's yawning wealth divide.
Now Brazil's president has announced plans to resettle more than 100,000 landless families this year and promises additional agrarian reform over the next two years.
Building on this success, DfID's UK Aid Match fund has generated over half of the additional cash that allowed the programme to reach more women and landless youth.
The initiatives distributed land to more than two million landless families and, in turn, established a leftist coalition known as the Left Front that dominated state politics for three decades until showing recent signs of weakening.
Mr. Doc Phum and Mrs. Reach Somaly are among more than 200 landless people from four provinces who now live under the tamarind trees outside the Parliament building, not far from a hospital where most of the children they have brought with them are being treated for chicken pox, which is epidemic.
The land was not divided on an equal basis, however; he repaid his faithful soldiers and generals, and members of the royal family and their kin also received more than did the landless peasants.
About 40% of people there live on less than $1 a day and, in the country as a whole, more than half are landless labourers, who buy rather than grow their food.
"Along with other rural groups, there are thought to be more than 2 million landless farmers in Brazil, which makes them a modest political force in a population of 200 million people.
Then you wind your way down into Southern Punjab and Sindh where the affected people are more likely to be landless laborers, urban shopkeepers or tenant farmers struggling against the remnants of the old feudal land and political system.
