Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
Land Policies
The uneven distribution of arable land continued to be a
fundamental obstacle to the economic development of the
Dominican Republic in the 1990s. Despite active attempts to
reform land tenure patterns, the basic dichotomy of latifundio
(see Glossary) and minifundio (see Glossary) continues to be
the predominant feature of rural life. According to the 1981
agricultural census, 2 percent of the nation's farms occupied 55
percent of total farmland. By contrast, landholdings averaging
less than twenty hectares, which represented 82 percent of all
farms (314,665 units), covered only 12 percent of the land
under cultivation. Land distribution on both extremes was
notably worse. Some 161 farms, 0.1 percent of all farms, occupied
23 percent of all productive land, whereas tens of thousands
of peasants possessed only a few tareas (the tarea, the
most common measurement of land on the island, equaled
one-sixteenth of a hectare)
The government is the largest landholder. The state-owned
largest sugar producer, CEA, established in 1966 to manage the
sugar operations acquired from the Trujillo family, and the
Dominican Agrarian Institute (Instituto Agrario Dominicano
IAD), the national land reform agency, control the overwhelming
share of public-sector land, most of which was derived from
Trujillo's estate. The two major privately owned sugar producers,
Central Romana and Casa Vicini, along with several large
cattle ranches, represent the largest private landholdings.
The concentration of land ownership in the Dominican
Republic, although it can trace its roots back to Christopher
Columbus's parceling of land, resulted principally from the
"latifundization" of land with the advent of commercial sugarcane
production in the late nineteenth century. The concentration
of arable land ownership increased after 1948, when
Trujillo intensified his involvement in the sugar industry. In a
little over a decade, Trujillo doubled the amount of land dedicated
to sugarcane. The dictator and his cronies seized as
much as 60 percent of the nation's arable land through colonization
schemes, the physical eviction of peasants from their
land, and the purchase of land through spurious means. In the
aftermath of Trujillo's assassination in 1961, the government
expropriated his family's landholdings by means of Decree
6988, thus setting the stage for contemporary land policy.
In 1962 the post-Trujillo Council of State created the IAD to
centralize agrarian reform and land policy, charging the orga-
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