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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
Farmers at work in the Maule Norte irrigation project near
Talca
Courtesy Inter-American Development Bank
At the time of the military coup, about 60 percent of
Chile's
irrigated land and 50 percent of total agricultural land
was in
control of the public sector. Land reform had started in
the 1960s
with expropriations of large landholdings (those larger
than eighty
basic irrigated hectares--BIH), and the encouragement of
small
farms (about 8.5 BIH) managed by their owners. The Allende
administration favored large-scale farms under
cooperatives and
state-farm management over private ownership of
agricultural land.
Starting in 1974, the military government began using Cora
to end
agrarian reform by distributing land to establish family
farms with
individual ownership. In a period of three years, 109,000
farmers
and 67,000 descendants of the Mapuche had been assigned
property
rights to small farms. About 28 percent of the
expropriated land
was returned to previous owners, and the rest was
auctioned off.
Three key legal issues were then clarified by decree
law in
1978. Government authority to expropriate land was
repealed, the
ceilings on landholdings (the equivalent of eighty BIH)
were
removed, and the ban on corporate ownership of land was
eliminated.
At the end of 1978, all farmland owned publicly had been
distributed, and Cora was legally closed.
Reforms in the legislation that regulated land rentals
and land
subdivisions in 1980 added flexibility to the rural land
markets.
But perhaps more crucial aspects of the reforms were the
separation
of water rights from the land itself and the legal
possibility of
transferring water titles independently of land
transactions.
Data as of March 1994
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