Urban Concentration, Agriculture, and Agrarian Reform

Price controls and concealed taxes on everything the farmer sells, and inflationary prices for everything he buys, plus squatter sovereignty and banditry, have impoverished the small farmer in Latin America. This has caused thousands to flee to the cities, creating housing shortages and slums. There are only two legitimate goals of agrarian reform: to increase productivity, meaning increased abundance for the entire nation ; and the enhancement of human dignity, meaning the transformation of peons into proprietors. Land reform programs based on confiscation and redistribution of existing efficiently 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 government-owned lands, and on more effective land taxes and inheritance taxes to induce landowners to put their properties to more efficient use, or to sell them to others who would do so. The government must, above all, maintain law and order, for if there is no security for life and limb and private property, as is the case in Colombia and as was true in Mexico after 1910, there can be no solution for the problems of agriculture, no sound program of agrarian reform, no remedy for excessive urban concentration, and no end to city slums and housing shortages.