Land Reform

Land reform is the class of government policy that redistributes agricultural land, most often from large landholders to the tenants or laborers who work it, or reorganizes how land is owned and used, in order to reduce rural inequality, raise agricultural productivity or dismantle a colonial or feudal landholding structure. Its own legitimacy claim is distributive rather than constitutional: that productive use of land by those who actually work it, and a more equal distribution of access to it, is a more just basis for a rural political and economic order than a concentrated historical title resting on colonial grant, feudal inheritance or wartime confiscation. Emiliano Zapata's 1911 Plan de Ayala, demanding the return of village land seized under Mexico's Porfiriato and threatening confiscation of haciendas that refused to comply, is among the most influential single articulations of the modern demand, later codified in Article 27 of Mexico's 1917 constitution. Programs described as land reform have taken sharply different forms and been pursued for different ends, from the redistribution carried out in occupied Japan and Taiwan after 1945 to the forced collectivization of land under Soviet and Maoist central planning, and remain a recurring policy tool in developing economies.