Land reforms by country
According to the 1988 Constitution of Brazil, the government is required to "expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function" (Article 184).
Then, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement government abolished forced peasantry labor and established a program of expropriation and distribution of the rural property of the traditional landlords to the indigenous peasants.
[2] In the early 21st century, tentative government plans to use the land legally expropriated from drug lords and/or the properties given back by demobilized paramilitary groups have not caused much practical improvement yet.
Land reform occurred during the "Ten Years of Spring" (1944–1954) under the governments of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz, after a popular revolution forced out dictator Jorge Ubico.
[5] The model used by Velasco to bring about change was the associative enterprise, in which former salaried rural workers and independent peasant families would become members of different kinds of cooperatives.
A third land reform occurred as part of a counterterrorism effort against the Shining Path during the Internal conflict in Peru roughly 1988–1995, led by Hernando de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy during the early years of the government of Alberto Fujimori, before the latter's auto-coup.
From the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) Paraguay came out losing land to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay as well as suffered from a great decline in population and was left with political instability.
Under the Agrarian Statute, there was also the creation of IBR (Instituto de Bienestar Rural) which "mandated to plan colonization programs, issue land titles to farmers, and provide new colonies with support services.
The reforms were halted in 1961 due to a culmination of factors, including opposition from large landowners and severe crop failure during a drought between 1958 and 1961, whilst Syria was a member of the doomed United Arab Republic (UAR).
According to Zaki al-Arsuzi, a co-founder of the Ba'ath Party, the reforms would "liberate 75 percent of the Syrian population and prepare them to be citizens qualified to participate in the building of the state".
[38] In the further reparcellings, which started in 1848 when Finland was part of the Russian Empire, the idea of concentrating all the land in a farm to a single piece of real estate was reinforced.
Their theories inspired private settlements and official government programms for the so called Binnenkolonisierung (interior colonization), whereby wasteland could be transformed into homesteads for the poor.
Despite the vain attempts of the governments to redistribute the land in Southern Italy (the so-called Mezzogiorno), from the pragmatic decree De administratione Universitatum (1792) of Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to the law Leggi eversive delle feudalità (which literally means "laws abolishing feudalism") in 1806–1808, enacted by Joseph Bonaparte, the issue remained largely unsolved, mainly because of the strenuous opposition of the great landowners, unwilling to lose their privileges and to allow the emancipation of the peasant class.
The decree, financed in part with the funds of Marshall Plan, launched by the United States in 1947, but also opposed by conservative members of the American administration[46] probably was, according to some scholars, the most important reform of the aftermath of World War II.
Several related mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an aging demographic.
All land, whether state, crown, monastery, church, factory, entailed, private, public, peasant, etc., shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people, and pass into the use of all those who cultivate it.
[72] The Verkhovna Rada terminated the Honcharuk Government on 5 March 2020 and pledged the passage of legislation sought by the International Monetary Fund to lift the ban on sales of agricultural land.
[103] As part of the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, president Robert Mugabe initiated a "willing buyer, willing seller" plan, in which white land-owners were encouraged to sell their lands to the government, with partial funding from Britain.
Parliament, dominated by Zanu-PF, passed a constitutional amendment, signed into law on 12 September 2005, that nationalised farmland acquired through the "Fast Track" process and deprived original landowners of the right to challenge in court the government's decision to expropriate their land.
In 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15, taking coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, and dividing it into 40-acre plots for black settlement, hence the term "40 acres and a mule".
In the 1940s, the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, funded with American money, with the support of the national government, carried out land reform and community action programs in several provinces.
In the mid-1950s, a second land reform during the Great Leap Forward compelled individual farmers to join collectives, which, in turn, were grouped into People's communes with centrally controlled property rights and an egalitarian principle of distribution.
Chen, Wang, and Davis [1998] suggest that the stagnation was due, in part, to a system of periodic redistributions that encouraged over-exploitation rather than private capital investment in future productivity.
This law was one of the first steps towards the development of capitalism in Japan, paralleling the English (and later United Kingdom) statute Quia Emptores enacted several centuries earlier.
By the end of the Second World War, 58% of arable land in North Korea was privately owned by Japanese colonists and Korean feudal landlords comprising 4% of the population.
On March 5, 1946, the North Korean Provisional People’s Committee enacted the 1946 Land Reform Law whereby both Japanese colonists would have their entire estate expropriated and Korean landlords in possession of more than 50,000 square meters of land would have their estates expropriated and distributed to existing tenant farmers for free, abolishing the existing tenant farming system.
In October 1958, the Workers' Party of Korea government increased the size of the average cooperative to 300 households managing 500 hectares of land through consolidation of all farms in each village.
In the years after World War II, land redistribution to poor and landless peasants was initiated by the communist Viet Minh insurgents in areas which they controlled.
[154][155][156] 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.
