Remodelingagrarian is the term used to designate the land redistribution (agrarian or land) in a State. When there is a concentration of land in the hands of one person or few people, we have the formation of latifundia (large land holdings which, due to their extension, are not properly and completely explored).
The latifundiums make the land not have its social value fulfilled and lead to the social inequality by serving only as a source of enrichment for real estate speculators. The agrarian reform aims, in its essence, for a fairer land distribution that contemplates the smaller and less powerful farmers, who, in general, practice the agriculture and family livestock.
Read too: Contemporary slave labor: a very present reality in Brazilian large estates
What is agrarian reform
Agrarian reform is a type of basic reform, that is, a restructuring or change that directly affects the foundations of society. The word “reform” refers to improvement or change, while the term “agrarian” designates a landholding structure, that is, a structure for organizing the lands of a national State.
Europe and its colonies were formed on top of large landholding structures, that is, with the possession of land being exercised by few people. At Modernity, O enlightenment (theoretical philosophical current of political thought that emerged in France in the 18th century) brought the idea that land was a common good for all who exercise citizenship in a state, therefore, it must be recognized as a good that has a valueSocial.
The social value of land supports the idea that there must be full use of agrarian properties for the production of food and consumer goods and the extraction of natural resources and energy, so that the entire population is covered for the goods provided by it. In this sense, the formation of large estates does not exploit the land in the way it should be and excludes those people who can only produce on a small scale from the production chain.
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agrarian reform in the world
THE French Revolution it was the first major political movement of agrarian reform in Modernity. At the Old Regime, in which politics was ruled by a noble caste and the participation of the clergy was direct and effective, the land was distributed in France (and in European countries in general) only between the nobility and the clergy. Some bourgeois also owned land, but this possibility of possession was very restricted and was subject to the will of the nobility to sell their properties.
It is interesting to note that the acquisition of land by the noble class did not take place commercially (purchase and sale), but through the process of ownership and feudal distribution among the powerful gentlemen of Middle Ages, centuries before the French Revolution. With the removal of power from the French court and the beginning of the end of the privileges of the noble class in the revolution, a process of land redistribution in France.
This reform, however, largely contemplated the bourgeois class, which had greater conditions to use the land and pay for it. However, many peasants who acquired small properties confiscated from the nobility and clergy and had up to 10 years to pay off their debts with the State were also contemplated with it.
US StatesUnited, agrarian reform took place in the 19th century, but slowly and without much political or ideological influence. At the beginning of US colonization, settlers who settled in the south formed small tobacco and food plantation properties.
That modelfamiliar, however, it was soon replaced by the landlord and by techniques called plantation, based on the formation of large estates, in large production aimed at export, mainly of cotton, and in the use of slave labor. After the independence of the 13 colonies, this land structure remained in the United States.
In 1850 the American parliament began to issue proposals for review of the land issue in the country, but not through expropriation but through the purchase and redistribution of small properties. Until 1862 the proposal did not go forward, until the beginning of the secession war it provided a kind of re-modulation of certain social structures, in addition to having provided a new configuration in the United States Parliament, now with a republican majority.
Republicans, led by the president Abraham Lincoln, were anti-slavery, which helped to implement the land distribution plan. Without slave labor, the large-scale production model on large estates was, at the time, seen as unsustainable by producers, which encouraged the sale of properties.
At the Mexico, the agrarian reform took place from 1910, with the mexican revolution, led by socialist-inspired social leaders Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. After the structuring of the coup, its execution, the overthrow of the dictator Porfírio Diaz and the installation of a new government, the revolutionary leaders accepted the idea (of the influential Mexican intellectual Andrés Molina Enríquez) of confiscating and redistributing rural properties with more than 2,000 hectares in size. The land was divided and later offered to smaller farmers with letters of credit that allowed their purchase.
See too: What are the agricultural powers?
History of agrarian reform in Brazil
Land concentration in Brazil began in 1530, with the formation of hereditary captaincies, which were strips of Brazilian land, and their donation to the donor captains. The captains had the mission of colonizing the territory and producing in it, and had, in return, to pay the equivalent of one sixth of the production in taxes to the Portuguese Crown.
In the beginning there were only 14 hereditary captaincies, distributed to men who were able to produce in Brazilian lands. However, the colonization system did not work. Some donor captains gave up acting or did not want to bear the high costs of travel and production in Brazilian lands. Still the territory was concentrated in the hands of a few.
From the independence of Brazil, in 1822, the lands began to be managed by those who had greater economic and political power. THE nobility and the upper bourgeoisie they continued to own most of the land, which resulted in an unequal system based on latifundium and existing to this day.
After 1850 the Land Law, which resulted in practices of land appropriation and annexation by large landowners via forgery of real estate registration documents (a practice known as land grabbing|1|). In other capitalist countries, land concentration was eliminated or reduced as a way to stimulate liberal capitalist production. In Brazil, however, land concentration still persists.
In 1984, after a series of hard struggles by peasants against land concentration in Brazil in the middle of Military dictatorship, a unified movement for agrarian reform called Landless Movement (MST). The movement had the support of organized sectors of civil society and left-wing parties, in addition to the later support of international entities.
Pros and cons of agrarian reform
At first agrarian reform is a necessary action in a country with land concentration practices. When the reform is well planned, structured and executed, the benefits can be noticed by the population. In a liberal capitalist system or in a socialist system of government and economy, there is an understanding that social inequality does not allow for the good economic development of the population. In addition, there is the understanding that the land has a social value that must be respected for there to be democracy and that everyone can enjoy the goods provided by it.
Nevertheless, a poorly structured agrarian reform can result in the perpetuation, and even intensifying of inequality. social, when it creates mechanisms that do not allow the acquisition of small properties by small producers agricultural.
Grades
|1| Land grabbing consists of the annexation or possession of land with the forge of registration documents (documents that prove the legitimate ownership of land to a person). The grileiros forged the documents and kept them in a drawer or box with crickets, which gives the paper an aged look. Thus, many public lands were illegally leased by squatters who claimed to have acquired or inherited them from ancestors.
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor
