Post War Attempts At Agrarian Reform
Tae Damndjperiod
By chance, I was rapporteur for the sub-commission drafting the declaration on agrarian reform. The actual wording was drafted by representatives of Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela and Brazil, all of whom were personally convinced of the need for radical reforms. Moreover, land reforms were under way, or anticipated, in their own countries. In order to reach a consensus at the conference, the declaration had to be acceptable to the U.S. delegation (headed by the Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson), the Cuban delegation (headed by Che Guevera) and countries most opposed to reform (spoken for most forcefully by the delegation from Peru). Every phrase and comma had to be considered with these many constraints in mind.
The problem regarding land distribution has worsened recently due to the expansion of monoculture in specific, soy. Paraguay has become the fourth world's largest distributors of soy. Due to this distribution, soy companies are the largest landowners, taking over 80 percent of the land. This production has negatively impacted the lives of rural peasants by leaving them without their own land. Thus, in March 2017, the streets of Paraguay's capital were filled with more than 1000 campesinos demanding for agrarian reform.
It has been argued that the land reform represented work by the 'socialist government', however, by 1984 the private sector controlled 74 percent of Syria's arable land.[20] This questions both Ba'ath claims of commitment to the redistribution of land to the majority of peasants as well as the state government being socialist (if it allowed the majority of land to be owned in the private sector how could it truly be socialist?). Hinnebusch argued that the reforms were a way of galvanising support from the large rural population: "they [Ba'ath Party members] used the implementation of agrarian reform to win over and organise peasants and curb traditional power in the countryside".[21] To this extent the reforms succeeded and resulted with an increase in Ba'ath party membership. They also prevented political threat emerging from rural areas by bringing the rural population into the system as supporters.
In 1975, the Republic of Afghanistan under President Mohammad Daoud Khan responded to the inequities of the existing land tenure conditions by issuing a Land Reform Law. It limited individual holdings to a maximum of 20 hectares of irrigated, double-cropped land. Larger holdings were allowed for less productive land. The government was to expropriate all surplus land and pay compensation. To prevent the proliferation of small, uneconomic holdings, priority for redistributed lands was to be given to neighboring farmers with two hectares or less. Landless sharecroppers, laborers, tenants, and nomads had next priority. Despite the government's rhetorical commitment to land reform, the program was quickly postponed. Because the government's landholding limits applied to families, not individuals, wealthy families avoided expropriation by dividing their lands nominally between family members. The high ceilings for landholdings restricted the amount of land actually subject to redistribution. Finally, the government lacked the technical data and organizational bodies to pursue the program after it was announced.
Under the British occupation, the land system in India has been feudalist, with few absentee landlords holding most of the lands and claiming high rents from poor peasants. The demand for a land reform was a major theme in the demand for independence. After independence, the different states in India gradually started a land reform process in four main categories: abolition of intermediaries (rent collectors under the pre-Independence land revenue system); tenancy regulation (to improve the contractual terms including security of tenure); a ceiling on landholdings (to redistribute surplus land to the landless); and attempts to consolidate disparate landholdings. The extent and success of these reforms varied greatly between the different states of India.
After the Second World War, Karelians evacuated from areas ceded to the Soviet Union were given land in remaining Finnish areas, taken from public and private holdings with less than full compensation to the previous owners. Also the war veterans, and their widows benefited from these allotments. In addition, land could be provided to farms considered too small. The land could be acquired either via a voluntary purchase by the state or via expropriation. As a result of post-WWII land reform, 30,000 new farms were established, 33,000 small farms received more land and 67,000 families received either a plot for a single-family home or a homestead with some arable land.[33]
A 2022 study found that the post-WWII land reform "fueled comparative underdevelopment and precarity locally over the long term. Several related mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an aging demographic."[43]
The Latvian Land Reform of 1920 was a land reform act expropriating land under the first Republic of Latvia in 1920 (during the Latvian War of Independence shortly after independence). The agrarian reform law of 1920 sought to transfer most of the land from Baltic German nobles to Latvian farmers. On September 16, 1920 Constitutional Assembly of Latvia passed the law of the Land reform, which would break up large landholdings and redistribute land to those peasants who worked it and to the newly created Latvian State Land Fund.[45]
Beginning in the 1950s, the government tried to modernize the agriculture by granting large tracts of traditional grazing lands to large corporations and converting them into large-scale commercial farms. In the north and south, peasant farmers lacked the means to improve production because of the fragmentation of holdings, a lack of credit, and the absence of modern facilities. Particularly in the south, the insecurity of tenure and high rents killed the peasants' incentive to improve production. Further, those attempts by the Imperial government to improve the peasant's title to their land were often met with suspicion. By the mid-1960s, many sectors of Ethiopian society favored land reform. University students led the land reform movement and campaigned against the government's reluctance to introduce land reform programs and the lack of commitment to integrated rural development.
Following the American Civil War, many African Americans and Union Army officials considered land reform vital. The downfall of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated millions, but few former slaves had the means to exercise real autonomy. Land, even at depressed post-war prices, was difficult for African Americans to procure.[97] At the same time, with southern wealth the result of centuries of forced labor, blacks nationwide called for property on the basis of just reparations.[98] Politically, redistribution carried the support of Radical Republicans.[99] But opposing any grants to blacks were southern Democrats, along with President Andrew Johnson's administration committed to 'restoration'.[100][101] Given national divisions, reform efforts were varied but short-lived.
The final reform attempts of Reconstruction occurred within state governments. In South Carolina, a land commission was established, which purchased property and sold it on long-term credit.[108] Other state Republicans utilized new tax systems, penalizing large estates, to seize and divide land and stimulate black ownership. This indirect method achieved little, as taxes were repaid and lands were reclaimed. Of property not redeemed, much was exploited by investors.[109]
South Vietnam made several further attempts in the post-Diem years, the most ambitious being the Land to the Tiller program instituted in 1970 by President Nguyen Van Thieu. This limited individuals to 15 hectares, compensated the owners of expropriated tracts, and extended legal title to peasants who in areas under control of the South Vietnamese government to whom had land had previously been distributed by the Viet Cong.
After the War of Independence, Mexican liberals sought to modernize the economy, promoting commercial agriculture through the dissolution of common lands, most of which were then property of the Catholic Church, and indigenous communities. When liberals came to power in the mid nineteenth century, they implemented laws that mandated the breakup and sale of these corporate lands. When liberal general Porfirio Díaz took office in 1877, he embarked on a more sweeping program of modernization and economic development. His land policies sought to attract foreign investment to Mexican mining, agriculture, and ranching, resulting in Mexican and foreign investors controlling the majority of Mexican territory by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Peasant mobilization against landed elites during the revolution prompted land reform in the post-revolutionary period and led to the creation of the ejido system, enshrined in the Mexican Constitution of 1917.[1][2][3]
During the first five years of agrarian reform, very few hectares were distributed.[4] Land reform attempts by past leaders and governments proved futile, as the revolution from 1910 to 1920 had been a battle of dependent labor, capitalism, and industrial ownership.[5] Fixing the agrarian problem was a question of education, methods, and creating new social relationships through co-operative effort and government assistance.[6] Initially the agrarian reform led to the development of many ejidos for communal land use, while parceled ejidos emerged in the later years.[7] Land reform in Mexico ended in 1991 after the Chamber of Deputies amended Article 27 of the Constitution.[8]
Land tenure in Mexico has over the long term seen the transfer of lands into the hands of private proprietors engaged in agricultural production for profit. But the social and economic problems that resulted from this concentration of ownership brought reformist solutions that attempted to reverse this trend. In the current era, there is a retreat from agrarian land reform and a return to consolidation of land holding of large enterprises.
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