Bolivia unveils plan to distribute land to poor

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/international/ticker/detail/Bolivia_unveils_plan_to_distribute_land_to_poor.html?siteSect=143&sid=6725487&cKey=1147832622000

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivia's leftist government on Tuesday outlined its plan to redistribute idle land to poor peasants, ruling out mass expropriations and proposing instead the distribution of state-owned property. snip

Despite previous attempts to redistribute land in South America's poorest country, a recent report by the Roman Catholic Church found a small group of wealthy businessmen owned 90 percent of the country's territory.

The rest is shared among Bolivia's 3 million indigenous peasant farmers, who form Morales' support base.

[peacetalksforall]

1. 90% of land owned by small group of wealthy businessmen.

10% of land shared among 3 million indigenous peasant farmers.

Unbelievable.

The ratio is similar to wealth and taxes in this country?

[Vidar]

2. Bravo Morales!

[1932]

3. The last time land ownership was reformed in South America, in 60s and 70s

poor people getting land were so poor that they turned around and sold it to the wealthy former owners.

Recent attempts at land reform try to address this. For example, in Africa, IIRC, some countries have only been giving non-transferable leases to the new owners, but that makes it more difficult for people to borrow agains the value of the land so that they can invest in machinery and education to get the most out of the land.

IIRC, Venezuela is very concerned with helping people to get the machinery and the education they need to get the value out of their land, which increases the incentive for poor people to keep their land.

In any event, all these countries are learning lessons from the past and are figuring out ways to make land reform work to reduce the huge disparities between the wealthy and the poor, and I suspect they're going to get it right soon.

[rfkrfk]

4. Evo Mugabe-rales --> doing a great job .n/t

[zeemike]

5. The wisdom of the Jubilee

We only have to look back in time long enough to see the solution to the inequities in land ownership
The Jubilee and the sabbatical law solved it for ancient Israel
Land was distributed equally among the people and under the sabbatical law no land could be sold for ever. You could only sell it until the year of the jubilee which was every fifty years and then it reverted to the original owner whether money was owed or not.
And so even if the poor were forced to sell the land it returned to there children so that there was an inheritance every generation. It made poverty a temporary thing.
Perhaps there will be a leader in South America that will consider such a law to solve this inequity, I hope so.