ARnet Regional Reports South America 1998

Regional Report on South America
Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales (CEPES)
Rome, February 1998

Summary of the South American Regional Overview Report
Summary of the Regional Document on Agrarian Reform and Land Tenure Security -- South America
Fernando Eguren



1. The relevance of the issue of agrarian reform in South America

Even though averages are deceptive because they can conceal huge differences under an apparent uniformity, they nevertheless help to provide a rapid idea of certain aspects of the actual situation. South America is a region in which demographic urbanisation and the decline of the agricultural economy have been constants ever since the middle of this century, and considerably earlier in certain countries. At the present time 20.2% of the regional population is rural, and 10% of the national product comes from agriculture, silviculture, hunting and fishing .

But the rural and agricultural sectors are placing an increasingly heavy burden on South American society and its economy than these figures seem to suggest. In many countries the inequalities, backwardness and poverty that exist throughout society as a whole are much more acute in the rural environment and are the main causes of social violence, and the weakness of the democratic institutions.

Poverty levels Bolivia (1990) Ecuador (1990?) Perú (1994) Destitute 40.6 24.7 20.0 Non-destitute poor 30.1 38.4 29.0 Poor 70.8 63.2 49.0 Non-poor 29.3 36.8 51.0 Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 Source: Estudio de pobreza rural andina, PROANDES. Curtis Robert Glick y Rolando Morales, editores. UNICEF-BID, 1996.

The cities are saturated and cannot provide adequate services or productive employment for the migrants who are continuing to abandon up the countryside. It is becoming increasingly evident, especially in certain countries in the region, including the Andean countries, that the modernisation of agriculture on an equitable basis is not only a means of dealing with the widespread poverty that is entrenched in the rural areas but it can can also make a decisive contribution towards resolving one of the most widespread contradictions of present-day capitalism (and a cause of poverty), namely, its inability to create productive employment as rapidaly as necessary, despite production growth rates.

The agrarian issue has to be defined today in the Andean countries in terms of its role in economic and social development, and its potential ability to solve this contradiction. It is also in these terms that the specific issue of agrarian reform and the security of land tenure and of other resources must be approached.

2.  The Andean South American countries

The three Andean countries which make up South America in this initial phase of setting up a knowledge network are Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. These three regions share similar features, and in all three the weight of the rural sector is above the South American average.

Rural population and agricultural active population 1970 and 1995 (% of totals)

	Rural population rural		Active agricultural population
	1970	1995	1970	1995
South America	38.8	20.2	38.1	19.9
Bolivia	52.1	44.6	52.1	44.6
Ecuador	50.9	29.0	50.6	28.8
Peru	49.3	35.0	47.1	33.0
Source: FAO Production Yearbooks

The Andean chain divides each of the three countries into sub-regions, with a wide variety of different natural resources. The colonial experience which brought the Spanish west in contact with the indigenous cultures that developed at the beginning of the 16th century also established heterogeneous cultural and racial areas which colour the whole contemporary agrarian issue with specific features, as we shall be seeing. In each of these countries there are sub-regions with modern agriculture and predominantly western cultural elements jointly with other sub-regions in which both traditional technologies and institutions predominate (even though these are not homogeneous either).

3.  Agrarian reform

All three countries underwent agrarian reform in the middle of the present century. In Bolivia, against the background of serious social and political upheaval, an Agrarian Reform Act was passed in 1953 to be applied in the Andean areas which is where most of the large latifundia estates were found and which has the most dense peasant population. As a result of this agrarian reform, the large estates were practically abolished and the lands broken up and distributed among the peasants and their communities. In Ecuador, the Agrarian Reform Act was passed in 1964 and was implemented in the Andean region, even though theoretically it was supposed to apply to the whole country. A few years later, in 1970, Decree No. 1001 was issued under which agrarian reform was implemented in the coastal region. Other laws were subsequently enacted to encourage more efficient use of the land. In Peru the first Agrarian Reform Act was passed in 1964, but the political conditions were established for a radical reform in 1969 when the new law, No. 1776 was enacted to abolish the large estates in the country. Although a great deal of time has since passed, the evaluation of the effects of these agrarian reforms in still controversial, partly because the processes were highly complex and difficult to evaluate solely in economic terms. In effect, the agrarian reforms carried out in these three countries not only had an effect on land distribution but they also hastened the abolition of the existing pre-capitalist relations in the countryside, thereby helping to giving vast sections of the marginalized population the status of town-dwellers, building up more modern and democratic societies It should also be borne in mind that the agrarian reforms carried out over these decades were designed and executed top-down, since government was the only party with the initiative and with powers of implementation. There is no doubt that to a large extent this was a feature of the agrarian reforms in the period. But it is equally certain that, in every case, the reforms were preceded by modernization processes that were already weakening the traditional farming system, and were also prefaced by a large-scale mobilization of the peasantry, sometimes with violence, claiming both the large estates and changes in pre-capitalist labour relations by introducing wage-earning.

4.  The present state of land access and land tenure security

Compared to the situation as it existed two or three decades ago, the land is now distributed in a more equitable manner and -- with a few important exceptions, as in the case of the extension of the agricultural frontier in eastern Bolivia -- the bipolarism of the land ownership structure, between the "latifundios" and "minifundios", is no longer at the heart of the agrarian problem.

Land access and land tenure security problems are much more closely related to the operation of the markets today, and the facility with which the different sectors of the population can accede to the resources, services and institutions which enable them to successfully work on these markets, or the restrictions they face. The present danger is that what is becoming consolidated is not a bimodal land tenure structure but a bimodal structure for concentrating these resources. One of the main reasons for the instability of land tenure by small farmers and peasants at the present time is due to the disadvantages they face in a market economy compared with agricultural enterprises with greater economic, technological, financial and human resources and with a better and smoother relationship with government institutions. In recent years, the governments in all three countries have enacted laws encouraging the development of the land markets, and in Peru's case for the first time this century there is now the statutory possibility to privatize communal areas (eliminating or reducing protectionist systems). Unless policies are defined at the same time that promote equal access to these resources in such a way that at least a substantial part of small-scale and peasant agriculture can be guaranteed economic viability, many of these will have to give up their lands.

It is useful to examine some of the problems which underlie conflict and insecurity in all three countries, albeit with different degrees of emphasis:

• A large number of the landowners, particularly the small and peasant owners, have not managed to attain full legal title to their property. Despite the efforts made by governments, the process is not proceeding with the speed required. In Peru over half the plots are still untitled, and in Bolivia the overlapping of rights over the same land is a very serious problem.

• The emergence of agro-industrial complexes (different from traditional plantations) which are buying land, generally from the small farmers, and/or concluding contracts with small farmers to provide them with agricultural inputs under conditions which are frequently to their detriment.

• Large areas belonging to the indigenous Amazonian communities are being appropriated by corporations and economic interests because of the wealth of their potential in terms of timber, biogenetic diversity (the chemical, biochemical and pharmaceuticals industries), as well as their livestock, oil, and mining resources, and their potential for producing basic inputs to manufacture illegal drugs.

• The peasant communities are losing their rights over some of their communal areas, as a result of the concessions issued to mining companies.

• The threat to the land rights of the small farmers in areas of urban expansion, from the developers.

• The extension of the agricultural frontier thanks to irrigation work, for the benefit of the large-scale investors (conflicting with earlier strategies of benefiting small farmers).
  
  5.  Incentives and reactions to the problems of agrarian reform and land tenure security

We shall only mention a number of examples of recent initiatives or those currently in progress to deal with these problems.

• In Ecuador, an NGO -- Fondo Ecuatoriano Populorum Progressio (FEPP) (which has national responsibility for the knowledge network on agrarian reform and land security tenure) -- exploited the opportunity opened up by the conversion of the foreign debt to acquire land for the peasants. The European Union, knowing of the FEPP experience in supporting land access through loans to peasant organizations, suggested buying and managing part of the external debt package in order to set up a revolving credit fund to acquire the land, and to acquire title to it and legalize it. Between April 1990 and June 1995 the programme helped 199 peasant organizations, benefiting about 8,000 households, with over 380,000 hectares.

• In eastern Bolivia, indigenous peasant organizations have made important progress in having their rights to their ancestral lands recognized, in place of confrontation (which are traditional in the Bolivian rural trade union circles) and with negotiation (in which widespread mobilization played an important part). Partly as a result of these actions, 15 million hectares were set aside for the indigenous peoples of eastern Bolivia, guaranteed by law. The NGO presence is decisive in the implementation of peasant actions in many areas of the inter-Andean valleys and in the highlands. Some of these, such as Taller de Iniciativas en Estudios Rurales y Reforma Agraria - TIERRA - (which is the national NGO responsible for the knowledge network on agrarian reform and land tenure security) exercises its influence both at the level of the peasant organizations and the government, and it has proposed a National Covenant for Rural Development in Bolivia, which includes making progress in regularizing land title.

• In Peru the new liberal agrarian legislation has faced the peasant communities - numbering 5,000 in the whole country - with the dilemma of whether or not to privatize communal lands. An NGO - Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales (CEPES) - (the national NGO responsible for the knowledge network on agrarian reform and land tenure security) is working with communities in the southern Peruvian Andes to design methodologies and procedures to permit them to solve the complex problems of the rights of the "comunera families" over communal lands, the statutory regularization of communal lands, and solving boundary disputes with other farms, including those with other peasant communities.