Word: agrarian
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...storm of protest against Fidel Castro's confiscatory agrarian-reform law * rolled into the acoustic-walled Cabinet room in Havana's presidential palace one night last week and brought on the first major split in the Cuban revolution. From 9 p.m. until 2 a.m., ministers snapped at each other across the oval mahogany table. For five of his 20 ministers, Castro had short, blunt rebukes...
...companies were officially silent, privately frantic. "This isn't expropriation," cried one sugar executive. "It's confiscation!" Said another: "We're sort of sick here." Sugarmen talked hopefully about one provision in the law: the newly created National Agrarian Reform Institute can let foreigners own land when "beneficial for the development of the national economy." This loophole may permit the companies to stay on until they can find buyers for the land. But losses will be heavy. The price of sugar land has already dropped by half from a year ago, and shares of the affected companies...
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...
...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...
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...