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Venezuela Land Policies
Despite agrarian reform efforts beginning in 1960,
Venezuela's land tenure patterns in 1990 still portrayed
the
typical Latin American dichotomy between latifundios and
minifundios (small holdings). For example, data on
land
tenancy from agricultural censuses from 1937 through 1971
pointed
to a pattern of land concentration. More recent estimates
mirrored data from these earlier censuses. One estimate in
the
late 1980s, for example, held that the smallest 42.9
percent of
all farms covered only 1 percent of the arable land, while
the
largest 3 percent accounted for as much as 77 percent of
arable
land.
The country's major land reform program began with an
initial
decree in 1958 after the fall of the dictatorship of
Marcos Pérez
Jiménez. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1960 created the
National
Agrarian Institute (Instituto Nacional Agrario--INA),
which
sought to provide land to those who worked it, initially
by
transferring public lands and later by expropriating
private
holdings of arable land not under cultivation. Although
the
government invested substantial resources in an effort to
integrate its rural development strategy through the
provision of
roads, markets, schools, and clinics, new agricultural
colonies
rarely had the conveniences of earlier farming towns.
Accordingly, the land reform experienced a dropout rate as
high
as one-third. Moreover, few of the peasants who stayed in
the
settlements actually obtained legal title to their land,
which
remained in the hands of the state.
Land reform had made only modest adjustments in
Venezuelan
land tenure through 1990. By the 1980s, over 200,000
families had
benefited from the state's distribution of nearly 10
percent of
the country's total land area. The average size of the
country's
400,000 farming units stood at eighty hectares in 1989,
considerably higher than earlier decades. Improved access
to land
helped expand the country's total land under cultivation
and
accelerated the country's attainment of self-sufficiency
in
certain crops and livestock. On the negative side,
however, the
benefits of land reform were seriously tainted by the
programs'
high failure rate and the fact that as many as 90 percent
of
participants never gained title to their land. Without
land
titles, farmers lacked collateral to obtain financing for
needed
agricultural inputs. These factors, combined with the fact
that
immense private tracts of land remained intact,
demonstrated the
relatively minor impact of land reform.
Data as of December 1990
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