Carving Up a Very Small Pie

By George Russell

Land reform faces a huge problem: too few acres to go around

"The government of El Salvador has been keeping its promises, like the land-reform program, which is making thousands of farm tenants farm owners."

--Ronald Reagan, in his April 1983 address to a joint session of Congress

"The agrarian reforms are a failure, and they are being made to fail by corruption and debt. Let the Reagan Administration say it's a success. They 're liars."

--Leonel Gomez, former adviser, Salvadoran land-reform agency, February 1984

Seen from the air, El Salvador is a stunning landscape of dormant volcanoes and twisting river gorges. That mountainous beauty, covering roughly three-quarters of the countryside, is also a national curse. With the highest population density in Central America (601 per sq. mi.), similar to that of India, El Salvador is a land that is ideal for guerrilla warfare but pitifully inadequate for the agricultural needs of its people. Salvadoran geography creates some harsh problems: Who owns the country's meager agricultural resources? How should they be put to use? These are among the most important issues in the country's civil war.

As Jose Napoleon Duarte prepares to assume the presidency of El Salvador, those land problems are once again under intense scrutiny, both at home and in Washington. At issue is the four-year-old U.S.-backed attempt to bring about social change in El Salvador and undercut support for Marxist-led insurgency among the country's 2.3 million rural inhabitants. The means: a sweeping land-reform program, akin to the one attempted by the U.S. in Viet Nam from 1970 to 1975, that aims at a radical transfer of scarce acreage from El Salvador's former feudal oligarchy to the majority of poor campesinos. The program, says a Western diplomat in San Salvador, is "essentially a socialistic program in a country fighting to defeat Marxist rebels."

Long under violent attack from both the extreme right and the extreme left in El Salvador, the attempt to redistribute land has followed a tortuous and sometimes bloody course and one that has cost two American lives.*Salvadoran conservatives have criticized the program for taking far too drastic an approach to the country's socioeconomic problems; the revolutionary left says that it is doing too little, too late. In the U.S., the program has provoked both skepticism and confusion over its aims and its ultimate usefulness in dealing with El Salvador's extremes of wealth and poverty.

The three-phase land reform was originally proposed within months of the October 1979 coup that installed a reformist civilian-military junta. Phase 1 of the reform, implemented at the time Duarte joined the junta in March 1980, expropriated 426 private Salvadoran estates that exceeded 1,235 acres. Phase 2, calling for the takeover of farms ranging in size from 247 to 1,235 acres, encountered strong opposition from the right, including the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) led by Roberto d'Aubuisson. Under a compromise adopted last December, Phase 2 now applies only to farms larger than 605 acres, but so far, none of the land in question has been redistributed. Phase 3, known as the land-to-the-tiller program, also went ahead in 1980. It allowed an estimated 117,000 landless farmers and their families to purchase the small (up to 17 acres) plots that they had previously worked as tenants or sharecroppers. In all, some 228,230 acres of land, or 6% of El Salvador's cultivated area, was subject to change of ownership under Phase 3.

Initially, the land-reform program was viewed with distaste by the Reagan Administration: the White House did not approve of government expropriation of private property. Gradually, however, the Administration has embraced agrarian reform as the kind of worthy effort in El Salvador that justifies large accompanying doses of U.S. military aid. Duarte left no doubt in Washington last week that, although he would water down some of his more liberal economic views, he would not sacrifice land reform to please El Salvador's conservative business community. On the contrary, Duarte's election could accelerate the process.

Since 1980, the program has won $113.3 million in financial support from Congress. In January, however, the inspector-general's office of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) issued a controversial 40-page report that took a searching look at the reform and concluded politely that it had had "mixed results." Among other things, the audit claimed that many of the 317 major farm cooperatives created under Phase 1 are "not financially viable." The future of those plantations, which produce mainly coffee, cotton and sugar, seems "bleak," said the report, without additional government assistance. As of September 1983, the cooperatives owed a total of $400 million. "If this process continues," the report added, "the debt could total about $2 billion by the year 2000."

The report also took issue with the land-to-the-tiller program. After four years, said the audit, less than half of the eligible applicants (some 50,000 out of an estimated 117,000) have petitioned for purchase. Roughly one-third of those who did apply for their land failed to work it, "because they had been threatened, evicted or had disappeared."

In an irate rebuttal, AID management declared that the inspector-general's report gave a "narrow, incomplete and in some cases inaccurate portrayal" of the program. The immediate aims of the reform, said AID, were to prevent El Salvador's political collapse and help avoid radicalization of the rural population. In those terms, said AID, "the reform has been an undisputed success." The State Department reported to Congress in January that land reform in El Salvador "has often seemed halting and painful," but "the overall record is one of significant progress." According to State, more than 10% of El Salvador's total population of 5 million, and perhaps 25% of the country's rural poor, have benefited from the program.

Typical of the achievements of the agrarian program is the Astoria Hacienda, a cooperative cotton and sugar plantation in the humid central department of La Paz, some 30 miles from San Salvador. Expropriated in 1980 as part of the Phase 1 land reform, Astoria is now run by 165 former sharecropper and tenant families, totaling about 840 people. They have the hired help of some 1,500 additional landless peasants who work during the five-month sugarcane harvest season. Prior to the takeover, recalls Segundo Flores, 33, president of the Astoria coop, "life was very hard. We did whatever the boss asked, no questions. Now we decide our own future."

Flores can point to some material improvement since the creation of the Astoria cooperative. As a tenant he earned the equivalent of $14.40 a week; now he takes home $20. But the plantation's new owners must pay off the capital debt resulting from purchase, an estimated $625,000. They have suffered from their lack of experience in managing an agricultural enterprise. Says Flores: "We are still learning. This is a huge business that will take time for us to operate just right."

The same spirit pervades the cooperative membership at the El Espino coffee plantation, a 2,400-acre spread on the outskirts of the Salvadoran capital. Says Jose Eduardo Gonzalez, 27, head of one of the 153 co-op families on the farm: "If suddenly you own the place where you only used to work, immediately your future is brighter." Gonzalez points to the existence of a clinic, a school and a market offering consumer credit on the plantation, facilities that were previously unknown. "We have much left to do," says Pablo Antonio Ramos, another co-op member. "But real progress will have to wait until the war is settled."

There is no such thing as progress for some 1,000 migrant workers who flock to El Espino during the harvest season. Their living quarters are crumbling hovels. Their naked children, potbellied with hunger, sit nearly motionless in the nearby shade. Many of the migrants are refugees from the guerrilla war who fled from land in other parts of the ravaged Salvadoran countryside. Nearly all of them echo the aspirations of Antonio Arevalo, 26, a landless sugar-cane worker at the Astoria Hacienda, who sighs, 'If there were some way I could join a cooperative, my ife would be much easier."

The chances of that happening are growing slimmer by the day. For one thing, some 40 cooperative farms created under the Phase 1 land reform have had to be abandoned because of the civil war. In La Paz department, for example, a Salvadoran land-reform official tells how peasant farmers were confronted by guerrillas who demanded a dramatic increase in wages for the migrant help. "We told them we could not do it," relates the official, "or else we would not have enough money to buy fertilizer and other supplies." The guerrillas then demanded and received money for their own support. When Salvadoran army officials learned of that arrangement, they angrily ordered the co-op to form a civilian-defense unit. Finally, the insurgents drove the co-op owners away.

The agrarian reform is also approaching its practicable limit. Under Phases 1 and 3, about 750,000 acres have been freed so far for redistribution. Phase 2 should provide only 20,000 to 70,000 acres. Yet despite the many criticisms of the reform, it is something of an achievement that a major redistribution, totaling about 23% of El Salvador's arable land, has taken place at all during the turbulent conditions of the insurgency. The transfer has in fact added to the violence. Says Marion R. Brown, director of the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: "With land reform there are always winners and losers, and the losers generally put up a fight." Brown notes that in countries where postwar land reform proved to be a resounding success, such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the presence of U.S. forces played an important stabilizing role.

Even more essential for the success of land reforms in other countries was the existence of effective grass-roots organizations to push for the change. Says Brown: "If land reform is not done by those who will be the beneficiaries, then it won't perform well." Brown faults the Salvadoran government, U.S. advisers and campesino organizations for failing to take sufficient account of local conditions. The land-to-the-tiller program, for example, assumes that much of the country's soil will support continuous intensive fanning by small holders. Yet the opposite is true. Under the previous sharecropping system, the practice of renting out poorer lands on an annual basis meant that patterns of cultivation constantly shifted.

For all its faults, the Salvadoran land reform has undeniably improved life for hundreds of thousands of campesinos.

Just as clearly, even the most perfect land redistribution would not solve the battered country's rural plight: there simply is not enough land to go around. El Salvador's explosive population growth (currently about 2.6% annually) will continue to compound the problem. Says a Western official in El Salvador: "The agrarian reform has done a lot to take the heat out of the massive drift of campesinos to the violent left. But in the long term, El Salvador will have to come up with an economic alternative to agriculture." With civil war raging, alternatives of any kind in El Salvador are few and far between.

--By George Russell. Reported by Ricardo Chavira/San Salvador and Christopher Redman/Washington

*In January 1981, U.S. Labor Lawyers Michael P. Hammer and Mark David Pearlman, technical advisers to the land-reform program, were gunned down in the capital of San Salvador. Duarte said in Washington last week that an independent presidential commission will be set up to investigate these killings, as well as other death-squad activities.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira, Christopher Redman