Word: betterment
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fertile land by the nearby seashore, are owned by Marquis Anselmo Berlingieri, whose family has held them for centuries. Most of Berlingieri's land is uncultivated; he finds it more profitable to graze his sheep on it, and the bitter townsfolk say that the sheep of Melissa are better fed than...
...does work, Berlingieri-like most of Italy's other larger landowners-follows an ancient ruinous practice: he raises two wheat crops in succession, and turns the produce into a quick cash profit. Then he returns the land to his sheep. Berlingieri's tenants can do no better; generation after generation they have worked their fields only on three-year leases, had to face expulsion from the land at the end of each three-year term at the owner's will. They never dared to invest years of labor improving a soil whose yield might not be theirs...
...committees set up to consider their claims. The committees have been working at a snail's pace; with his usual policy of trying to please everyone-the landowners as well as the peasants-De Gasperi had pleased no one. Last week the government was readying a new and better land-reform bill. It provides that unused or poorly used land of 8,000 estate owners will be expropriated, bought up by the government and sold to peasants on easy payment terms...
Premier de Gasperi held one of his rare press conferences, gave out reassuring figures showing Italy's rising food production. He hopefully pointed to ECA projects in Italy which are trying to educate the peasants to use their land to better purposes. At La Sila, not far from Melissa, the Italian government, with ECA help, is spending 15 billion lire ($24 million) on a project to improve the land, plans to settle 20,000 peasant families there. They will be instructed in crop rotation and other modern agricultural methods, get new tools and fertilizers. The U.S. has earmarked about...
...knew better than Gonzalez how painful economic reforms could be. Four months ago students, protesting over an increase in bus fares, set off a bloody riot in Santiago. But his whirlwind stump tour had won Gonzalez enough political support to put over the plan. Now his problem would be to hold down prices firmly enough for the plan to work...