Despite the broad title, this is an essay specifically about the merits of land reform as public policy for economic development in Latin America. After 1959, U. S. fears of regional instability, coupled with an increasingly vocal intellectual disaffection from neoclassical theories of international trade and development, made the concept of land redistribution as public policy appealing to U.S. and international agencies providing technical and financial assistance to Latin American governments. The charter of the Alliance for Progress (1961) expressed this sentiment. Agricultural development economists and consultants were encouraged to focus on the theoretical and applied problems of land tenure reform in Latin America.
In those years, Peter Dorner and his colleagues at Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center (established with AID funds) made an influential “economic case for land re form,” arguing that a series of institutional transformations brought about by a “particular regime of policies” would result in more equitable economic growth (p. 19). Their case rested fundamentally on the potential consequences for policymaking of an observed inverse relation between farm size and productivity. Dorner’s monograph evaluates these theoretical insights and the policies derived from them in light of the outcomes of land reform over 30 years of swift socioeconomic change throughout Latin America.
After a skeletal overview of the most noteworthy reform policies and land tenure changes in various Latin American countries, Dorner concedes that there can be “no clear and definitive judgment” about the effect of these policies (p. 56), since “a number of significant changes have taken place which are not related to land reform” (p. 50); and he acknowledges “the near impossibility of isolating the consequences of reform efforts from the totality of dynamic forces driving change and development” (p. 33). In any case, lack of “political will,” obstructive legal procedures, and unexpectedly complex land tenure patterns have frequently stood in the way of implementation. As for theory, Dorner argues for the continued relevance of the inverse farm size-productivity relation as a guide to public policy, the green revolution notwithstanding. Despite dramatic shifts in population structure and the expansion of industrial and other nonfarm sources of income, Dorner concludes, land reform is still needed, although “the potential gains from even a well-structured and supported land reform are likely to be more limited than would have been the case 25 to 30 years ago” (p. 73).
This essay should interest historians in at least three ways. First, the inconclusiveness of Dorner’s attempt to assess the impact of land reform initiatives on the trajectory of recent rural transformations raises questions about the proper place of policy in historical explanations of change. Causal links between policy and outcomes are too often assumed. Second, this text can be profitably read as a source for the history of rural development strategies for Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Third, Dorner’s analysis of specific themes in land economics and rural social relations is often enlightening; for example, on the problems of production cooperatives (pp. 52-56). The book also contains a useful bibliography.
