Land Reform, Agriculture, and Deforestation

Land tenure in much of Latin America traces its structural inequality to the colonial encomienda and hacienda systems, under which the Spanish and Portuguese crowns granted vast landholdings to conquistadors and later colonial elites, concentrating agricultural land in large estates (latifundios) worked by indigenous labor, enslaved Africans, or, after independence, tenant farmers and sharecroppers. This concentration persisted well into the 20th century, and measures of land inequality, such as the Gini coefficient applied to landholding rather than income, have historically ranked Latin America among the most unequal regions in the world by this measure, a pattern documented extensively by agrarian scholars including the economist and diplomat Raúl Prebisch, associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC/CEPAL), founded in 1948.