THE LONG, SAD HISTORY OF "LAND REFORM"

THIS means the great landed estates will be broken up throughout Latin America," said a top U.S. sugar broker last week, as Fidel Castro signed his agrarian reform decree. The Castro bill quickened Latin America's deep yearning to reap a better living from underdeveloped land. The Venezuelan Cabinet, for example, moved ahead with a land reform bill of its own.

The basic facts of Latin American land tenure are stark. Less than 5% of Latin America's 8,000,000 square miles is under cultivation, although two-thirds of the 190 million people live from agriculture. Population density is only 24 to the square mile (v. 54 in the U.S.), but millions go hungry. Farm productivity per man-hour is less than one-fifth that of the U.S., food output barely keeps pace with population, and most of the 20 countries must import food.

The cultivated land is largely tied up in latifundios, the big farms that have dominated Latin American agriculture ever since the time of Conquistador Hernan Cortes, who got a royal grant of 100,000 Indians and 25,000 square miles of farmland in 1529. In Venezuela, 3% of the land holders own 90% of the land; in Chile, 2% own 52%; just 2% of the people own half of Brazil.

"The system of land tenure that dominates Latin America," said a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study, "has not resulted in a satisfactory adjustment between population and land resources." Pressure has been growing against the latifundios ever since Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata raised his famous war cry of "land and liberty" in 1910. Many Latin American constitutions nowadays contain a fervent clause about the need for land reform. At a meeting of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America last week in Panama, the 21 hemisphere nations recommended agrarian reform "whenever appropriate."

THE mere fact that land reform seems overdue has never guaranteed that it will work. Most attempts have been disastrous failures, chiefly because they were hastily executed and designed not as sound economic measures but attempts to destroy the latifundistas as a political class. P: Mexico's victorious rebels of 1910-17 burned down the stately haciendas, handed out land helter-skelter--and watched farm production sag. By 1940, when 64 million acres had been given to landless families, agricultural output stood 20% lower than in 1910. Reason: the new landowners were content to raise just enough to eat, committed such disastrous follies as smashing irrigation dams to plant crops in the fertile lakebeds. Only half a century later did Mexico become a big producer.

P: Communist-lining President Jacobo Arbenz (1951-54) of Guatemala gave out land to 180,000 peasants, mostly by the direct method of telling them to go take what they wanted. Result: subsistence farming and land wars--and, incidentally, the beginning of the plot that overthrew the regime.

In Bolivia, where 500,000 peasant families have taken over land since 1952, about 60% of the food is imported.

Concentration on breaking latifundista political power often obscures the fact that a country may have excellent virgin farmlands available. Ecuador spent its public funds not for expropriating land but for building 1,600 miles of roads to open up the hot coastal plains. A thousand persons still own 80% of the cool Andean valleys, but peasants on free, 124-acre coastal plots are enjoying a boom that raised agricultural income 43% in seven years.

Even when they aim strictly at giving land to the landless, most Latin American countries lack the capital and skill needed to make land reform work. The new landowner rarely gets the needed seeds, credit, machinery, farm animals: Unchecked, he often sells his land back to the estate owner.

FRAGMENTING land into small holdings clashes head on with the trend toward efficient, big-scale farming with machinery. Essential for modern grain cultivation, big-scale farming is also useful in sugar; Puerto Rico tried and let die a 500-acre limit on sugar farms. By turning his agrarian reform against bigness rather than inefficiency, Castro may well scare off all U.S. capital and thereby slow Cuba's growth toward a diversified economy. As Mexico and Puerto Rico have proved, diversification provides new jobs and takes most of the fire away from the land-reform issue. Only 55% of Mexico's citizens now live off the land (compared to 80% in 1930). The most prosperous Mexican farmers are the big ones, who have found ways of getting around land reform's parcelization. Among the richest planters in Morelos is Nicolas Zapata, son of Emiliano.

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