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Paraguay Land Tenure
The history of land tenure in Paraguay is distinct from that in
most Latin American countries. Although there had been a system of
land grants to conquistadors, Paraguay was distinguished by Jesuit
reducciones that dominated rural life for over a century.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and later the Spanish,
the state had become the owner of 60 percent of the country's land
by the mid-1800s. Large tracts of land were sold, mostly to
Argentines to pay the country's war debt from the War of the Triple
Alliance. This was the beginning of the concentration of land in
Paraguay not in the hands of the Spanish or of a local elite but
rather of foreign investors. Land policy remained controversial
until the 1930s, when there was a broader consensus for the titling
of land to users of the land and mediating between
latifundio and minifundio (small landholding). After
1954 multinational agribusinesses, mostly Brazilian and American,
played an increasing role in the economy, often purchasing enormous
tracts of land devoted to raising cattle, cotton, soybeans, and
timber.
The most recent data on land tenure was the agricultural census
of 1981, which followed earlier major agricultural censuses of 1956
and 1961. The most striking change from 1956 to 1981 was the kind
of ownership of the farms. In the 1956 census, 49 percent of all
farmers squatted on their land compared with only 30 percent in the
1981 census. This data suggested an increasing interest on the part
of small farmers in obtaining title to their land in the face of
growing land pressures. The 1981 census also indicated that 58
percent of all farms were owned outright and 15 percent were
sharecropper farms; the 1956 census showed that 39 percent of farms
belonged to farmers and 12 percent were worked by sharecroppers.
Another striking element of the 1981 agricultural census was the
great disparity between small and large landholdings. According to
the census, 1 percent of the nation's more than 273,000 farms
covered 79 percent of the nation's farmland in use. These large
farms had an average landholding of almost 7,300 hectares. Many of
the largest holdings were cattle farms in the Chaco region. By
contrast, the smallest farms, which made up 35 percent of all
farms, covered only 1 percent of the land, making the average size
of a minifundio 1.7 hectares, or less than was necessary for
one family's subsistence. Still, the 1981 census figures were
somewhat more encouraging than those in the 1956 census, which
showed that 1 percent of farms covered 87 percent of the land, and
46 percent of farms covered only 1 percent of the farmland. Another
encouraging trend that the census quantified was the declining
number of farms under 5 hectares in size and the growth of small to
medium-size farms (5 to 99.9 hectares).
Despite these positive trends, the 1981 census pointed to an
increasing problem of landlessness. Census figures indicated that
roughly 14 percent of all peasants were landless. Landlessness
historically had been mitigated by the undeveloped nature of the
eastern border region. Because the owners of estates in the region
used only a portion of their holdings, peasants could squat on the
properties without retribution. Land pressures also were alleviated
by the vast tracts of untitled land in the east. Beginning in the
1960s, however, competition for land in the area increased
dramatically. Many estate owners sold their lands to
agribusinesses; the new proprietors, who were committed to an
efficient and extensive use of their holdings, sometimes called
upon the government to remove squatters from the lands.
Squatters also came into competition with Paraguayan colonists
and Brazilian immigrants. Thousands of colonists were resettled in
the eastern region under the government's agrarian reform program
(see Land Reform and Land Policy
, this ch.). The Brazilian
immigration occurred as a result of a dramatic increase in land
prices in the 1970s in the neighboring Brazilian state of Paraná.
Many farmers sold their properties and crossed into Paraguay, where
land was much cheaper. By the late 1980s, at least half of the
population in the departments of Canendiyú and Alto Paraná was
Brazilian.
Data as of December 1988
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