Two decades later farmers who got small plots of government lands are struggling to eke out a living out of the land to which they do not even have freehold title.
Mistakes
Meanwhile rainfall is not enough to sustain water intensive rice farming for the promised two seasons a year with some environmentalists partially blaming depleted forest cover for the volatile weather patterns.
"I think that in the eighties and the early nineties, we really didn't do as good a job as we might have of integrating social and environmental concerns into programs, into agriculture programs and into infrastructure programs," Kathy Sierra, Vice President for Sustainable Development at the World Bank.
"I think we have learned a lot since then."