Suchergebnisse

Price controls & concealed taxes on everything the farmer sells, & inflationary prices for everything he buys, plus squatter sovereignty & banditry, have impoverished the small farmer in Latin Amer. This has caused thousands to flee to the cities, creating housing shortages, & slums. There are only 2 legitimate goals of agrarian reform: to increase productivity & to enhance human dignity. Land reform programs based on confiscation & redistribution of existing inefficiently operated farms, or which permit squatters or peasants to take private property without payment, do not fulfill either objective. A true agrarian reform program should be based primarily on distribution of gov-owned lands & on more effective land & inheritance taxes to induce landowners to put their properties to more efficient use or to sell to others who will. The gov must maintain law & order for if there is no security, as is the case in Colombia & was the case in Mexico after 1910, there can be no solution for the problems of agri, no sound program of agrarian reform, no remedy for excessive Ur concentration, & no end to city slums & housing shortages. Modified HA.

Colombia's current attempt at agrarian reform began in December 1961 with the passage of Law 135, "On Social Agrarian Reform." The Law has as its central objective a change in land tenure relationships in the densely populated western (or Andean) section of Colombia, where latifundia and minifundia often exist side by side. The Law established the Colombian Agrarian Reform Institute (Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria or INCORA) as a semiautonomous governmental agency to direct the process of reform. In recent months, however, the pace of the reform, which began ten projects during the first six months of 1962, has been slowed considerably due to a multitude of problems, among which the most serious are unswerving opposition to the program by both the large landowners and their allies on the right, the Movimiento Revolutcionario Liberal (MRL and its allies on the left, and inadequate financing.