Land Reforms by Country 2024

Land is generally considered finite as there are very, very few ways for a country to increase its land size. As such, land is a very valuable resource that is often at the center of complex economic, environmental, and societal issues. What a previous generation used land for might not be what the present generation needs it for. As such, countries across the globe often grapple with land reforms. Land reforms are a type of political process that seeks to redistribute, improve, and regulate land ownership and use via top-down methods.

Major Land Reforms by Country

South Africa is one of the most prominent countries undergoing significant land reforms in recent decades. Here, the government has been tasked with addressing apartheid-era dispossession of land by white Europeans. Land reforms have thus been implemented to redistribute land among the native population and offer restitution where that's not possible.

Ecuador became the first country in the world to establish the right of nature to be respected and restored in a 2008 amendment in their Constitution. By giving nature its own rights, the country enacted land reforms that make it harder for mineral excavation and has worked to reduce future human impact to the Amazon Rainforest and heal what environmental harm has already been done to the area.

Also in South America, Chile has instituted a number of agrarian land reforms in response to the previous Spanish government's land policies. That previous government concentrated land ownership in the hands of a few large landowners who were tasked with using the land primarily for agriculture. The Chilean agrarian land reforms sought to expropriate and redistribute much of that land, encouraging also more varied use of it as with rural development programs.

During the British occupation of India, land was seized from local communities and transitioned into a sort of feudalistic style of land ownership in which a few British landlords (often not living in the country) held most of the land, using a managerial class to manage the peasantry and extract from them rent and goods. After India gained its independence, the country began a series of land reforms that continue to today. These land reforms include putting ceilings on how much land any one person or entity can own, abolishing the land revenue system and rent collectors, improving tenancy terms, and other perceived unjust land ownership and regulation laws held in the pre-Indepenence era.