LATIFUNDIUM. - Property of great extent, belonging to a single owner. From the technical-economic aspect, the latifondo can be more exactly defined as: a large estate in which, for many reasons, intensive cultivation is not practiced; that is, it is not sufficiently exploited. The causes may be natural (climate, quality of the soil, lack of water, etc.) or material (lack of capital) or voluntary (selfishness of the owners, inertia of the rural population). The latifondo must therefore not be confused either with uncultivated land or with large agricultural property that is intensively cultivated, whether farmed in scattered holdings or not.
The latifondo was considered a most serious plague afflicting Italy since the times of ancient Rome, despite the famous agrarian reforms of the Gracchi, in connection with a particular politico-social conception according to which manual labor was despised by the Roman citizen of the classical age and the rural economy was based predominantly on slave labor.
The latifondo was increased not only by the possessions of the cities, the municipalities and the Caesars (ager publicus), destined almost exclusively for pastoralism, but also by the increasingly frequent sales of land by small proprietors, burdened with debts, to the powerful Roman patricians, enriched by continuous military campaigns and who, because of their immense financial resources, cared little for the rational exploitation of their landed properties.
The latifondo survived the collapse of the Roman Empire and the disappearance of the slave economy: it persisted through the Middle Ages across the Gothic and Byzantine invasions and under Norman and Angevin rule; nor was the problem solved by the innumerable but irrational redistributions of land to the victorious warriors, carried out under the regime of the Swabians, the Aragonese and the Bourbons.
Despite the disappearance of feudalism and the abolition of serfdom, the political unification of Italy and the evolution of juridical and social conceptions, the latifondo still persists in vast zones of Sicily, the Mezzogiorno, Latium and the Tuscan Maremma.
However, the phenomenon was never and is not exclusively Italian, because it has occurred and occurs in all the countries of Europe and beyond, even those agriculturally advanced; and it presents the same disadvantages everywhere.
Hence the problem of the abolition of the latifondo, considered by all as of the utmost urgency (cf. Settimana sociale di Napoli [cited in bibl.], p. 274; National Catholic Rural Life Conference of the United States in Documentation Catholique, 1948, col. 754; Unione di Molines, in Cahiers d'Action religieuse et sociale, 1950, p. 143). Hence also the Church's preference for the family farm, which better binds the peasant to his land, diminishes the baleful plague of urbanisme, intensifies production, because it awakens and sharpens the farmer's interest, and keeps the family healthier (cf. Pius XII, Esercitazione ai coltivatori diretti, in Discorsi e radiomessaggi, VIII, 1946-1947, Vatican City 1947, pp. 301-309).
On the other hand, Christian social doctrine itself conceives the right of property not in an absolutist sense and as an end in itself, but as an instrument of perfection and outward expression of the human personality, framing it within an organic conception of social life that admits no exclusion, to the advantage of a few, from the enjoyment of the goods indispensable to the community, such as land precisely is.
Naturally, any change in the landholding regime in latifondo zones can never be crowned with fruitful results unless it is preceded and accompanied by adequate technical and economic measures, capable of making possible the practice of modern agriculture in those regions.
It falls to the State, which in a social democracy inspired by Christianity cannot stand apart from the problems of production and labor, to carry out a complete plan for the execution of public works, roads and waterworks, with the adoption of suitable hygienic and sanitary measures to secure for the colonists who will settle on those lands, uninhabited and uncultivated for centuries, a decent standard of living, which may attach them to the land and enable them to live honestly by their own labor.
To individual initiative, on the other hand, will be entrusted the realization of all those works that relate more specifically to the farm, such as plantings, clearing, water regulation, construction of stables and farmhouses, under penalty of forced expropriation for those who fail to comply, in favor of colonization agencies, cooperatives or small direct cultivators.
In the field of agrarian contracts, a fairer regulation of sharecropping relations, the abolition of intermediaries, the gradual elimination of wage labor through the establishment of sharecropping relations on a family basis, at least wherever the creation of compact farms is possible, must mark a first step toward the diffusion of small peasant property, a factor of economic well-being and social tranquility.
Conversely, since often, precisely where the latifondo properly so called exists, the diametrically opposite phenomenon of excessive fragmentation also occurs, as a direct consequence of the misery of the rural masses, giving rise to the so-called peasant latifondo, appropriate norms must be issued capable of consolidating small parceled property and of preventing further subdivisions, on the occasion of alienations or hereditary succession, so as to bring about that land reorganization capable of finally satisfying the technical and productive requirements and the burning hunger for land of the rural classes.
Moreover, the solution of the problem is linked to a substantial reform of customs that may reawaken in agricultural owners the awareness of their social duties and confidence in a better future, and in agricultural cultivators the desire to become competent and ever more attuned to the common good.
Bibliography8 works
Bruno Rossi