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Peru Land Reform
The most striking and thorough reform imposed by the
Velasco
government was to eliminate all large private
landholdings,
converting most of them into cooperatives owned by prior
workers
on the estates. The reform was intended to destroy the
basis of
power of Peru's traditional elite and to foster a more
cooperative society as an alternative to capitalism. Such
socialpolitical purposes apparently dominated questions of
agricultural
production or any planned changes in patterns of land use.
It was
as if the questions of ownership were what mattered, not
the
consequences for output or rural incomes. In fact, the
government
soon created a system of price controls and monopoly food
buying
by state firms designed to hold down prices to urban
consumers,
no matter what the cost to rural producers.
As mentioned earlier, the cooperatives had very mixed
success; and the majority were converted into individual
private
holdings during the 1980s. The conversions were authorized
in
1980 by changes in the basic land reform legislation and
were put
into effect after majority votes of the cooperative
members in
each case. The preferences of the people involved at that
point
clearly went contrary to the intent of the original
reform. But
the whole set of changes was not a reversion to the
pre-reform
agrarian structure. In fact, the conversions left Peru
with a far
less unequal pattern of landownership than it had prior to
the
reform and with a much greater role for family farming
than ever
before in its history.
Data as of September 1992
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