The High Cost of Giving

Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, sole owner of the crown's 2.5 million acres, is Iran's biggest single landholder. Since 1950 he has distributed his vast farm properties to the peasants of some 100 of his villages. To help establish a new class of independent farmers, a Development Bank has lent the new small holders money at low interest. But his fellow landlords (who own 70% of Iran's arable acres, the vast majority of its 40,000 villages) have heeded neither the Shah's example nor his exhortations to sell some of their land to the peasants. In fact, at one point a few years ago, the landlords were so embarrassed by the Shah's generosity that they even persuaded the government to stop the Shah's own sales to sharecroppers.

But the revolution in neighboring Iraq that swept King Feisal to his death last summer and touched off sweeping land reform appears to have strengthened the Shah's reforming hand in Iran. Last week, though the landlords of Iran are as numerous and as niggardly as ever in the national parliament and ministries, the Shah boldly cut off one of their most cherished privileges. Through the years, on top of their usual fat share of their tenants' crops, landlords have been accustomed to take "gifts" from their peasants of "cattle, lambs, chickens, eggs, marriage dues, fines for quarreling, and presents taken on the eve of festivals." Effective at once, the government of Iran ordered provincial governors and police to put a stop to all such practices.

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