Orderly Land Reform

Long before Fidel Castro announced his confiscatory land-reform program for Cuba, a study commission that ranged across the political spectrum from two Communists to the Archbishop of Caracas was at work on the same problem in Venezuela--where 1.7% of the landholders own 74% of the land. Last week President Romulo Betancourt asked Congress to pass into law the commission's recommendations for a "peaceful, legal and orderly reform." No drastic social surgery, the bill's sensible goal is to force untilled land into cultivation and thereby reduce the $135 million that Venezuela now spends annually to import food.

Some 350,000 landless peasant families will be entitled to small plots of land and liberal government credit for equipment, seeds and fertilizer. The government will begin by parceling out its own vast holdings, most of it uncleared jungle, and will tax untilled estates so heavily that owners will be encouraged to sell. As a last resort the government will expropriate, but estates under proper cultivation will not be taken over, no matter what their size. "The law is neither leftist nor rightist," says Agriculture Minister Victor Jimenez Landinez. "It is simply just."

The land reform is the first real attempt in ten years to spend some of Venezuela's $800 million a year in oil revenues to develop the backlands. Thousands of farmers who have fled from-rural poverty to the city slums may now begin to drift back to the farm. The plan will cost $240 million the first year, $7 billion in all. Only the Communists denounced the plan as too moderate and refused to sign the commission's report. The other parties agreed with Caracas Archbishop Rafael Arias Blanco, who declared that passage of the bill "will be for me a feast day of great jubilation."

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