Rocky Road to Reform

"I'm not waiting for my son to have a better life--I want a better life." So says a member of President Fernando Belaunde Terry's Accion Popular party. He was talking about Belaunde's land-reform program--the sensible, carefully thought-out plan that, when it was signed into law 19 months ago, was hailed by experts as the soundest ever set up in the hemisphere. For many Peruvians, the rub is that the project to settle 1,000,000 peasants on their own land and double the country's acreage under cultivation will take at least a decade, and more likely 20 years. They are not willing to wait that long.

Under the original idea, land tagged for redistribution was to be thoroughly studied for crop and livestock potential, then paid for at fair value. Belaunde wisely exempted the big coastal sugar and cotton plantations that produce vital exports; instead, he aimed chiefly at Peru's highlands, where nearly 30 million of 32 million acres suitable for agriculture are held by big absentee landlords. Even then the government promised to set up a system of priorities to ensure that marginal estates were taken before well-managed holdings.

To date, some 550,000 acres have been turned over to 17,000 peasant families. For the land-hungry Indian this is too little, too slow. Half a dozen times in the past six months, Peruvian army troops have been sent to turn back large groups of impatient peasants invading haciendas in the Andean highlands. Early this month soldiers were forced to fire on 300 Indians who descended on a ranch north of Lima, killing three squatters and wounding two. So strong is the pressure that the government is sidestepping its careful, step-by-step program and plunging ahead.

A few weeks ago a highland district reform commissioner suddenly declared afectada (destined for expropriation) one of the most efficient ranch operations in the country: 440,000 acres owned by Cerro de Pasco Co., Peru's copper giant. Cerro officials reacted first with disbelief, then outrage when government officials refused to reconsider. In bypassing scores of marginally operated highland estates, said Cerro, the government had violated the spirit, if not the precise letter, of its own law. The company pointed out that its sheep produce three times as much meat as the neighboring Indian herds; furthermore, it ran the ranch as a nonprofit enterprise, selling the meat at cost to feed its 15,000 workers.

Down By a Third. Belaunde's government is well aware of the dangers involved in wholesale land giveaways. Mexico and Bolivia both experienced sharp drops in agricultural production when they went in for helter-skelter land reform; the Cuban economy is still reeling from Fidel Castro's mismanagement of the sugar lands. In Peru's own case, an efficient, 511,500-acre ranch near the Cerro lands was purchased two years ago by government officials, who parceled out most of it among 14 land-hungry Indian communities. Since then, 100,000 of the ranch's original 160,000 head of sheep and cattle have been eaten, given away, stolen or destroyed in one way or another; production is less than a third of its original level, while the government, hampered by lack of technical help, struggles to make modern ranchers of the new tenants who cannot read, and often cannot even speak Spanish.

Nevertheless, a Peruvian land reform official admits privately that virtually all the big highland estates will soon be afectadas, "even where the new landowners will certainly be unable to maintain, let alone improve, present productivity levels."

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