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Dominican Republic Land Tenure and Land Policy
The uneven distribution of arable land continued to be
a
fundamental obstacle to the economic development of the
Dominican
Republic in the 1980s. Despite active attempts to reform
land
tenure patterns, the basic dichotomy of latifundio and
minifundio continued to be the predominant feature
of
rural life. According to the 1981 agricultural census, 2
percent
of the nation's farms occupied 55 percent of total
farmland. By
contrast, landholdings averaging under 20 hectares, which
represented 82 percent of all farms (314,665 units),
covered only
12 percent of the land under cultivation. Land
distribution on
both extremes was notably worse. Some 161 farms, 0.1
percent of
all farms, occupied 23 percent of all productive land,
whereas
tens of thousands of peasants possessed only a few
tareas.
(The tarea, the most common measurement of land on
the
island, equalled one-sixteenth of a hectare.)
The government was the largest landholder. The CEA and
the
Dominican Agrarian Institute (Instituto Agrario
Dominicano--IAD),
the national land reform agency, controlled the
overwhelming
share of public-sector land, most of which was derived
from
Trujillo's estate. The two major sugar producers in the
private
sector, Central Romana and Casa Vicini, along with several
large
cattle ranches, represented the largest private
landholdings.
Data from the 1981 census displayed a land tenure
structure
that was essentially the same as that reflected in the
1971
census. The total number of farms in the 1981 survey was
385,000,
up from 305,000 a decade earlier.While the number of farms
had
increased substantially, the amount of cultivated land had
actually decreased slightly, from 2.74 million hectares in
1971
to 2.67 million hectares in 1981. The greater number of
farms had
resulted from agrarian reform measures and population
growth,
whereas the decrease in land cultivated had been caused by
erosion, development, urbanization, the decline of the
sugar
market, and other factors. The size of the average farm
shrank
from 1,439 hectares in 1971 to 698 hectares in 1981, an
indication of some minor success in land reform. Types of
ownership were not so well documented, but government
surveys
indicated that individuals owned 66 percent of all farms,
families owned 16 percent, and other types of tenure, such
as
cooperative ownership, sharecropping, and renting,
accounted for
the remaining 18 percent.
The concentration of land in the Dominican Republic,
although
it could trace its roots back to Christopher Columbus's
parceling
of land, had resulted principally from the
"latifundization" of
land with the advent of commercial sugarcane production in
the
late nineteenth century. The concentration of arable land
ownership increased after 1948, when Trujillo intensified
his
involvement in the sugar industry. Trujillo doubled the
amount of
land dedicated to sugarcane, in a little over a decade.
The
dictator and his cronies seized as much as 60 percent of
the
nation's arable land through colonization schemes, the
physical
eviction of peasants from their land, and the purchase of
land
through spurious means. In the aftermath of Trujillo's
assassination in 1961, the government expropriated his
family's
landholdings by means of Decree 6988, thus setting the
stage for
contemporary land policy.
In 1962 the post-Trujillo Council of State created the
IAD,
to centralize agrarian reform and land policy, with a
mandate to
redistribute the ruler's former holdings to peasants.
Agrarian
reform was hindered by the country's stormy political
transitions
in the 1960s, but it was strengthened in 1972 by
legislation that
authorized the government to expropriate unused farms in
excess
of 31.4 hectares under certain conditions. During the
1970s and
the 1980s, however, the IAD made slow and uneven progress
in
dividing up the government's huge new properties. IAD
reforms
provided individuals, cooperatives, and settlements
(asentamientos) with parcels of land. A range of
support
services, including land- clearing, road construction,
irrigation, agricultural extension services, and credit
usually
were also provided. By the end of 1987, the IAD and its
predecessor agencies had redistributed more than 409,000
hectares
of land. The redistribution included 454 projects that
benefited
75,000 families, or 460,000 citizens. In the late 1980s,
IADsponsored land yielded 40 percent of the national output
of rice,
75 percent of tomatoes, 31 percent of corn, and 39 percent
of
bananas and plantains.
Despite the broad mandate for land reform, a cause
strongly
advocated by the Balaguer administration in the late
1980s, many
criticized the IAD's overall lack of progress since 1962.
The
greatest progress on land reform occurred from 1966 to
1978, when
the government redistributed approximately 174,000
hectares.
Reform slowed considerably from 1978 to 1986, when only
66,000
hectares were redistributed. Making land available,
however, is
only one component of successful reform. Peasants
criticized the
IAD's sluggish performance in transferring land titles,
its
providing mainly marginal agricultural land, and the
generally
inadequate level of support services caused by the lack of
funding and the ineffectual management of the IAD. Only 38
percent of IAD land was actually devoted to the
cultivation of
crops in the late 1980s; 9 percent was devoted to
livestock and
53 percent to forestry or to other uses.
After decades of wrangling, the Dominican Republic
completed
the 1980s with the issue of land largely unresolved from
the
perspectives of both peasants and commercial farmers, a
failure
most evident in data demonstrating an ongoing pattern of
skewed
land ownership. Frequent spontaneous land seizures and
invasions
by peasants of underused land throughout the 1980s
epitomized
rural frustrations. On one end of the economic spectrum,
numerous
rural associations, disconcerted by the pace and the
quality of
land reform, participated in land seizures, demanding
"land for
those who work it," an approach that forced the land
reform issue
into the judiciary rather than into the legislature. On
the other
end of this spectrum, agribusinesses complained of the
government's inconsistent policies with regard to the
expropriation of land. Some analysts viewed such
inconsistencies
as a deterrent to new investment in agriculture and
therefore as
counterproductive to the republic's efforts to diversify
its
economy away from sugar. Poverty continued to be a largely
rural
phenomenon and land a sensitive political subject,
indicating
that agrarian reform would persist as an issue.
Data as of December 1989
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