Agrarian reform
Agrarian reform is a set of political, economic, social and legislative measures promoted in order to modify the structure of land ownership and production in a given place. Agrarian reforms seek to solve two interrelated problems: the concentration of land ownership among a few owners and low agricultural productivity due to the non-use of derived technologies and infrastructures or speculation with land prices that prevents its productive use.
The ways to change land tenure can be through the expropriation of the land, with or without some compensation mechanism for the former owners, or through negotiated acquisition. Generally, the social results are the creation of a class of small and medium farmers who displace the latifundistas from hegemony.
Any review or reform of a country's land laws can remain an intensely political process, as land policy reform serves to change relationships within and between communities, as well as between communities and the government. state.
In the Spanish Empire
After the Napoleonic invasion and the development of the Spanish War of Independence, the Courts of Cádiz were constituted where the Constitution of 1812 was proclaimed, being one of the most liberal of the time. The indigenous, like the peninsular, He went from being a subject to being declared a Spanish citizen and, because he was, he could choose the economic occupation he wanted. All the deputies proclaimed the indigenous right to access property. The deputy of the government of Costa Rica, the clergyman Florencio del Castillo proposed the distribution of the land. The deputy of the Viceroyalty of Peru, Lieutenant Colonel Dionisio Inca Yupanqui defended the abolition of the tribute "that will spread comfort and prosperity among those innocent brothers"; at the same time, he also proposed the distribution of privately owned land. The principle of land distribution ended up being approved.
In Latin America
Mexico
The Political Constitution of the United Mexican States was a product of the Mexican Revolution, since its article 27 established the bases that began the agrarian reform in Mexico. Its legal basis consisted of pointing out that territorial domain corresponded to the nation and it was the nation that granted ownership to individuals. At the end of the six-year term of Abelardo L. Rodríguez, article 27 was reformed and added by decree of January 10, 1934, creating the ejido, establishing the procedure for agrarian distribution, the establishment of a branch of the Executive, an advisory body, private committees, a mixed commission and ejidal commissioners for the application and surveillance of agrarian laws, in addition to granting the president the character of "Supreme agrarian authority". The arrival of General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río to the presidency marked a pattern in agrarian policy, since he distributed 18 million hectares, benefiting more than 51,400 peasants.
Bolivia
With the agrarian reform law in 1953, the page opened to the most important land issue in the country. The conservative and liberal oligarchic sectors of the country at the end of the XIX century and beginning of the XX the dispossession of the lands of the original indigenous communities and nations continues, despite the rebellion and indigenous resistance in various parts of the geography, a situation that will change only after the war of Chaco from 1932 to 1935. During the Chaco War and at the end of it after the new defeat and mutilation of the territory, the entire Bolivian society lives a deep crisis that is characterized by the emergence of a new national consciousness.
In the middle of the XX century, Bolivia had a latifundia agrarian system characterized by unequal land tenure, conditions of servile work and low capacity to provide food to Bolivia. Approximately 4.5% of the population owned 70% of the agricultural land. For the first time there was talk of the need for an agrarian reform and to grant the Indigenous the same rights as the rest of the population through universal voting, The need to nationalize the mines and promote educational reform to instill in citizens the new national consciousness is also discussed. Measures that the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) carried out with the revolution. Some additional data to understand the agrarian reform in 1953: Bolivia had 30% of the population living in urban centers and 70% of the population lived in a rural area, and 70% were illiterate. Agriculture contributes 33% of the gross domestic product when ranchers controlled 92% of arable land. On the other hand, agrarian reform is not an objective of the MNR but rather a feeling and will of the peasants, mainly from the upper Valley of Cochabambino.
A growing wave of hacienda seizures that preceded the approval of the agrarian reform, which was promulgated by decree No. 3464 of August 2, 1953 in the town of Ucureña, municipality of Cliza, Cochabamba, place where the first Agrarian union in the country had been created in 1936. It was later elevated to law on October 29, 1956, during the presidency of Hernán Siles Suazo. Thus, the peasant movement has been a protagonist since the beginning of Bolivia's history, together with the labor movement and it has been even more so after the agrarian reform, generating important and decisive union and political organizations both in the west and the east of the country, such as the CSUTCB (Unique Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia) or the CIDOB (Indigenous Confederation of the Bolivian East), part of the COB (Bolivian Workers' Central) or in political expressions such as the MRTK (Túpac Katari Revolutionary Movement).
Despite the impact of agrarian reform in the Andean region, land grabbing developed in the lowlands and during the military dictatorships of Hugo Banzer Suárez and Luis García Meza, huge speculative latifundia emerged in the eastern part of the country, They managed to accumulate around 20 million hectares of land. Agrarian reform in Bolivia has continued to the present day, in three periods: 1996-2005; 2006-2009 and since 2010. Paradoxically, those who applied it in the first period were those who had fought it from the eastern region. The strong presence of international cooperation prioritized the titling of indigenous territories in fiscal areas without affecting large estates.
In 1996 the great process of land regularization and improvement of property rights began. The concept of Communal Lands of Origin (TCO) is also incorporated, which has meant the recognition of subsisting and vital original indigenous community property, opening the way for the consolidation of the coexistence of nations within the Bolivian nation-state. In such a way that now the reality of the Plurinational State of Bolivia is lived. By 2010, close to 80% of the national agricultural territory is cleared and with perfected titles. The remaining 20% is being reorganized.
In the second period, through the Agrarian Reform Redirection Law, the process was oriented primarily to the affectation of large properties. The acute political polarization that Bolivia experienced was stimulated by the rejection of the large landowners to this law. technological innovation in agriculture and grant resources to small food producers. By the 2009 constitution, a maximum limit of 5 thousand hectares was imposed on individual land tenure. In its article 398, it prohibits the latifundio when the possession of the land is unproductive; "the land that does not fulfill the social economic function; the exploitation of land that applies a system of servitude, semi-slavery or slavery in the labor relationship or property that exceeds the maximum established zoned area".
Since 2010, the property redistribution process was halted, for the sake of a "Productive Pact" between the peasantry and agribusiness. The final balance of the 1996-2014 process shows that in terms of titled surfaces, the main beneficiaries have been the indigenous peoples, who consolidated 23 million hectares in collective property rights of Community Lands of Origin.
Guatemala
Decree 900 or agrarian reform law in Guatemala was one of the goals of the government of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951-1954). It was intended to avoid a latifundio-minifundio relationship. All this would be achieved by expropriating idle land from the large landowners to be able to give it in usufruct to those who did not have it. Said procedure was achieved through the Local Agrarian Committees, which received complaints of lands in an idle state, which were passed on to the Departmental Committees and finally to the National Agrarian Department. The reform was intended to allow peasants to have land to work and give them the opportunity to earn more income. The Agrarian Reform caused numerous changes in Guatemala as many peasants benefited from the reform, at the expense of the owners of idle land. But due to the impact on the lands of the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in 1954, the opposition found the sponsor it needed to force President Árbenz to resign the presidency: the CIA - of which several officials had strong interests in the United Fruit Company. Company or the US Department of State - organized the Operation PBSUCCESS plan that ended the invasion led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who repealed the Agrarian Reform Law and restored the lands to their former owners, beginning with the UFCO.
Cuba
During the Cuban revolution, agrarian reform began in the Sierra Maestra, when the July 26 Movement decreed it on October 10, 1958, in lands controlled by the Rebel Army. On May 17, 1959 it was signed the agrarian reform law, applied throughout the country, which nationalized all farms with more than 402 hectares and gave up to 67 hectares to each of 100,000 peasant families. To put it into practice, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) was created. The second and definitive Agrarian Reform Law, promulgated in October 1963, nationalized farms of more than 63 hectares, leaving the rest in the hands of the peasantry or their cooperatives. The 1976 Constitution declared that the lands are the property of the entire village, except those owned by small farmers or their cooperatives.
The Alliance for Progress and Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
After the triumph of the Cuban revolution, in the context of the Cold War, the United States began to promote agrarian reforms in the region. In 1961, through the Alliance for Progress, the countries of the region were recommended to implement a series of structural reforms in order to access credit from the US government and international organizations. The main one was the comprehensive agrarian reform. Its objective was to curb the influence of the Cuban revolution and the Mexican revolution on the agrarian issue.
Chile
In Chile, this process was carried out between 1962 and 1973, as a response measure to the great inefficiency and crisis of national agriculture during the first half of the century XX. In 1962, Law No. 15020 on agrarian reform was approved. On July 16, 1967, two new laws were promulgated: No. 16,625 on Peasant Unionization and Law No. 16,640, which limited the accumulation of land to a maximum of 80 hectares. Between 1965 and 1970, 1,319 properties with a total of 3,408,788.3 hectares were expropriated throughout the country. During the Popular Unity period, the agrarian reform was strengthened with the execution of Law No. 16,640. The objective, in addition to giving land to the peasant, was to eliminate the latifundio as quickly as possible.
By the end of the Allende government, 4,691 landowners' properties had already been expropriated, covering more than 6.4 million hectares throughout the country.
Columbia
The land problem has been a constant in Colombian history and one of the causes of the internal armed conflict in Colombia. In 1936, Alfonso López Pumarejo with the so-called Revolution on the Move promulgated the Law 200 of 1936 that allows the expropriation of private property that does not fulfill its social function. Affected the Colombian countryside during the period of violence, Colombia experienced an urbanization due to the displacement of its rural population before carrying out an agrarian reform. The Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA) created with Law 135 of 1961 On Agrarian Social Reform by Alberto Lleras Camargo and promoted by Law 1 of 1968 of Carlos Lleras Restrepo that also recognizes the National Association of Rural Users (ANUC) with Resolution 061 of May 1967 and Decree 755 of the May 2, 1967. The land laws would be modified as a result of the Pact of Chicoral in the government of Misael Pastrana, by Law 4 of 1973, Law 30 of 1988 and Law 160 of 1994 that decreased the responsibility of the status in agrarian policies. Despite these attempts to democratize the land, the agrarian reform process stopped and began to reverse, due to the internal armed conflict in Colombia that caused the forced displacement of millions of peasants and a concentration of land ownership in the hands of the big landowners together with the dynamics of drug trafficking and internal displacement. In 2003, INCORA was modified with the creation of the Colombian Institute for Rural Development (INCODER) with Decree 13006 of 2003 and its modification by Decree 3759 of 2009 and the Agro Seguro Income (AIS) program, which failed due to corruption. Another attempt for land restitution is the Law 1448 of 2011 on Victims. Decree Law 902 of 2017 inaugurated a new model of agrarian reformism based on the social ordering of property over and above its own redistributive paradigm of the reforms of the XX century. This new model of access to land based on the formalization of informal property is known as the Comprehensive Rural Reform; which is part of the peace agreements between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC-EP signed in 2016.
Peru
After the industrialization process sponsored by Leguia, the migratory waves to the big cities began, especially during World War II, but this growth process was only temporary, after the war Peruvian export products were no longer in demand because the belligerent countries began to reactivate their industries; This produced a recession and many people were unemployed. The Agrarian Reform of Peru at first had the intention of making the large portions of land distributed in a few hands more productive by distributing them among people who would work the land, also getting those powerful landowners to industrialize as it was their only alternative. The expropriated people obtained the right to be compensated according to an appraisal carried out by the State, and on the basis of a just price whose payment was imperative by constitutional mandate.
After this action, Peru did not achieve the expected economic development. There was a large educational gap that had left the members of the lowest sector of the social pyramid behind, so they were not able to perform these functions of competitive and efficient way- [citation needed] This situation explains why the long-awaited large-scale industrialization process that those idealists who promoted this measure expected did not take place. However, although the economic-productive results were not as expected, it is important to highlight the great progress that was made in terms of demands and the partial deactivation of left-wing movements such as the MIR (they were left without their main objective). Until before the reform, the peasant population was attached to the land and was not recognized as a citizen. It is from this and other measures implemented by Velasco that the peasant population ceases to be made invisible and reified, and begins to become an interlocutor in the diverse Peruvian society. Thus, groups such as cooperatives also appeared: on the coast (CAPS: Agrarian Cooperation for Social Production) and in the mountains (SAIS: Agricultural Society of Social Interest).
Uruguay
Artiguista Agrarian Reform
In what is now the Eastern Republic of Uruguay at the beginning of the XIX century, then called Banda Oriental, carried out one of the most radical agrarian reform processes.
During the period of the Artiguista Revolution between 1811 and 1820, the greatest leader of that revolutionary process, José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850), began the process of distributing land, not only from public prosecutors but also from large Creole owners and Spanish people. For some Uruguayan historians with Marxist roots, this process has been interpreted as an "agrarian reform" radical and popular Particularly noteworthy are Lucía Sala de Tourón, Julio Rodríguez and Nelson de la Torre.
Artigas was a man with profound knowledge of the Banda Oriental and its natural inhabitants: the gaucho and the Indian, both excluded from land possession in the 17th century XIX. Together with Félix de Azara, he participated in the distribution of land as a settlement measure, promotion of the campaign and a precautionary measure against the Portuguese advance on the tenuous —if not non-existent— border between both empires, but it was insufficient.
The nineteenth-century landscape of the eastern campaign was characterized by depopulation as a result of large estates —many times simply occupied illegally, when not donated by the crown without even taking into account the true dimensions—, smuggling or banditry and the irrational exploitation given the overabundance of cattle.
The anarchic state in which the cattle-raising economic base of the Banda Oriental was immersed forced the Spanish authorities and the Creole ruling class to carry out the approach of a series of solutions that over time historians have called Settlement of fields. Many of these solutions failed, when they did not remain a mere expression of will or their success was very precarious.
With the outbreak of the Revolution, Artigas carried out a truly radical distribution of land, unknown in his time, and popular.
The Provisional Regulation of the Eastern Province for the Promotion of its Campaign and Security of its Landowners, was approved on September 10, 1815. With it, Artigas sought two well-defined purposes: first, to ensure a social base support his revolution. The maxim of artiguista thought in terms of social justice is summarized in the following idea: "that the most unfortunate be the most privileged" expressed in article 6 of the Regulations.
His second objective was to punish the counterrevolutionaries, an idea that is expressed in the famous phrase of the same document "bad Europeans and worse Americans", that is, the oppressors (the "godo") and all those Americans who were against the revolutionary process. In this way, revolutionary justice was exercised against the enemies of the revolutionary process, while rewarding those who had fervently embraced the revolution.
Laws related to the issue of agrarian reform
Europe
- In Russia
- 1917 Land Decree of the Second Congress of Soviets
- 1918 Basic Law of the Earth of the Third Congress of Soviets
- 1922 Code of Lands of the Soviet Union
- Bulgaria
- 1920 agrarian law
- 1945 Land Reform Law
- 1956 agrarian collectivization campaign
- In Romania
- Land Reform of 1919
- 1945 agrarian reform
- 1989 Individual titling of peasants
- In Albania
- Agrarian Reform Act 1945.
- Yugoslavia
- 1945 Land Reform Law
- 1950 agricultural cooperatives and self-management
- 1953 reduction of land ownership limit by family
- In Italy
- Act No. 841 of 21 October 1950
- In Spain:
- the decay of Mendizabal
- At the beginning of the Second Republic, Law on Agrarian Reform of Spain of 1932.
- In Portugal
- Decree-Law No. 203-C of 15 April 1975.
East Asia
- China
- Directive of 7 July 1946
- Land Law of October 1947
- Japan
- 1947 Nōchi-kaihō
- South Korea
- 1948 agrarian reform programme
- 1950 Law on Agrarian Reform
- Philippines
- Law 1160 of 1954
- Law 3844 of 1963, Land Reform Code
- Indonesia
- 1960 Basic Law
- Vietnam
- Land Reform Act of 4 December 1953
- Resolution 247 of 1975
- Resolution 254 of 1976
- Decree 100 of 1981 promotes peasant plots and initiatives
- Resolution 10 of 1988 Renewed Agricultural Management
Middle East
- Egypt
- Law 178 of 1952
- 1961 revision of the land reform law
- Syria
- 1958 Agricultural Relations Act
- 1963 agrarian reform measures
- Algeria
- 1964 nationalization of colonial lands
- 1971 the Ordinance and the Letter of the Agrarian Revolution
- 1983 Socialist Agricultural Domains
- 1987 Ensuring collective areas for the private sector
- Afghanistan
- 1975 Land Reform Law
- Decree 8 of 1978 on agrarian reform
- rules repealed in 1996
Sub-Saharan Africa
- Ethiopia
- 1976 Agrarian Reform Proclamation
- Kenya
- 1960 buyer program arranged / seller
- 2006 redistribution of land of large absent owners
- Zimbabwe
- 1979 buyer program arranged / seller
- 1992 Land Acquisition Act
- South Africa
- 1991 Law on the Abolition of Land-based Measures
- 1994 agrarian reform process
America
- In Mexico
- Constitution of 1917
- 1934-1940 land distributions
- Agrarian Act of 6 January 1971.
- In Venezuela
- Agrarian Reform Act 1945 (Government of General Isaiah Medina Angarita)
- Agrarian Reform Act 1948 (Romulo Gallegos Government)
- Law on Agrarian Reform of 1960 (Romulus Betancourt Government)
- Land and Agricultural Development Act 2001 - one of the enabling laws (Hugo Chávez Government)
- In Bolivia
- Agrarian Reform Act of 2 August 1953.
- National Agrarian Reform Service Act (Act 1715 of 18/10/1996).
- In Cuba:
- First Law on Agrarian Reform of 1959, replaced by
- Second Law on Agrarian Reform of 1963.
- In Colombia
- Law 200 of 1936
- Act No. 135 of 1961 on Agrarian Social Reform, as amended by Acts 1 of 1968, 4 of 1973 and 30 of 1988.
- Law 160 of 1994
- In Guatemala, Decree 900 (Agrarian Reform Act), promulgated by the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, in 1952.
- In Costa Rica Law No. 2825 of Lands and Colonization of 1961.
- In Chile:
- Agrarian Reform Act 1962 (Act No. 15020), replaced by
- Agrarian Reform Act 1967 (Act No. 16640) in force until 1974.
- In Peru:
- Agrarian Reform Basis Act of 1963 under Ricardo Pérez Godoy,
- Agrarian Reform Act of May 21, 1964 under Fernando Belaunde, and
- Decree Law No. 17716 of 24 June 1969 under Juan Velasco Alvarado
- (All rules were repealed by Legislative Decree No. 653 of 1992)
- In Ecuador:
- Agrarian Reform and Colonization Act 1964, as amended by
- Agrarian Reform Act, 1973
- Agrarian Development Act, 1992 (derogate from the previous one).
- In the Dominican Republic by the Agrarian Law of 1973
- In Brazil:
- Decree No. 612-A of 15 February 1962 established the National Conselho for Agricultural Reform
- Law No. 11 of 11 October 1962 created the Superintendence of Agrarian Reform (Supra)
- Decree No. 53.700 of 13 March 1964 took measures to redistribute land
- Terra Statute of 30 November 1964 established the social role of property
- Decree-Law No. 1.110 of 9 July 1970 created the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra).
- Decree No. 97.886 of 29 June 1989 restored the Incra.