|
El Salvador The Land Tenure System
Historically, landownership in El Salvador has been highly
concentrated in an elite group of wealthy landowners. Most of the
good arable land in El Salvador was located on large coffee
plantations, while lower quality land was rented to peasants, who
grew staple crops
(see Standard of Living
, ch. 2). Because these
plots often failed to provide even a subsistence-level existence
for them, the tenant farmers often worked as laborers for the
coffee plantations as well.
During the colonial period, a certain tension existed between
the hacendados--the owners of private plantations--and Indian
communities that laid claim to, but did not always make
productive use of, communal lands known as ejidos or
tierras comunales. Although some encroachment by
hacendados on Indian lands undoubtedly took place, this practice
was not apparently widespread, mainly because the Spanish crown
had supported the integrity of the Indian lands. After
independence, however, the process of private seizure of communal
lands accelerated, aided by the confusing and incomplete nature
of the inherited colonial statutes dealing with the ownership and
transfer of land. The rapid growth of coffee production in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led the government
to formalize the favored status of private, export-oriented
agriculture over subsistence farming through the passage of the
legislative decree of March 1, 1879. This decree allowed private
individuals to acquire title to ejido land as long as they
planted at least 25 percent of that land with certain specified
crops, most notably coffee and cocoa. Tierras comunales
were formally abolished in February 1881; the abolishment of
ejidos in March 1882 left private property as the only
legally recognized form of land tenure.
During the twentieth century, the conflict over land tenure
pitted commercial export-crop producers against campesinos who
sought to raise subsistence crops--mainly corn--on land to which
they rarely held legal title. Some campesinos worked under
various rental and sharecropping arrangements; however, an
increasing number functioned as squatters, with no claim to their
land beyond their mere presence on it. This occupation of private
and public lands was intensified by rapid population growth, the
expansion of cotton production that removed further acreage from
the total available for subsistence agriculture, and the
expulsion of thousands of Salvadorans from Honduras following the
1969 war between the two countries
(see The 1969 War with Honduras
, ch. 1).
As of 1988, the most recent agricultural census had been
conducted in 1971, but data on the 1980 land reform program
corroborates that extremely unequal land distribution patterns
persisted throughout the 1970s. According to the 1971
agricultural census, 92 percent of the farms in El Salvador (some
250,500 in all) together comprised only 27 percent of all farm
area. The other 73 percent of farmland was combined in only 1,951
farms, or 8 percent of all farms; these parcels were all over 100
hectares. Farms between 100 and 500 hectares represented 15
percent of El Salvador's cultivated area.
The land distributed under Phase I of the land reform program
included the largest plantations--all those larger than 500
hectares. Phase I divided up 469 individual properties, with a
combined area of 219,400 hectares, almost 18 percent of all
Salvadoran farmland. Nearly 31,400 Salvadoran heads of household
benefited directly from Phase I of the land reform; if family
members are included, the beneficiaries totaled almost 188,200.
Most of these lands were expropriated by the government and
divided among 317 cooperatives. The government hoped that the
economies of scale possible under a cooperative framework would
keep the farms efficient.
The government guaranteed the former landholders that they
would be compensated and had planned to pay them out of the
cooperatives' earnings. However, because the cooperatives
experienced major difficulties during their initial years, much
of the compensation had to be paid by the government. According
to a report released by the inspector general of AID in February
1984, the cooperatives established under Phase I of the land
reform "had massive capital debt, no working capital, large
tracts of nonproductive land, substantially larger labor forces
than needed to operate the units, and weak management." By the
end of 1985, only 5 percent of the 317 cooperatives formed under
the land reform were able to pay their debts, in spite of US$150
million in assistance from AID. Many lacked capital to buy
fertilizer, so yields steadily declined. Nevertheless, by the end
of 1987 almost all Phase I compensation had been paid. The
restrictions placed on Phase II by the Constituent Assembly
greatly limited its effect on land tenure because of the small
size of the plots
(see Agrarian Reform
, ch. 2). As of 1987,
however, phase II of the agrarian reform program had not been
implemented.
Data as of November 1988
|
