LATIFUNDIUM. – A property of great extent belonging to a single owner. From a technical-economic standpoint, the latifundium can be more precisely defined as a large estate in which, due to various circumstances, intensive cultivation is not practiced; in other words, it is not sufficiently exploited. The causes may be natural (climate, soil quality, lack of water, etc.), material (lack of capital), or voluntary (selfishness of owners, inertia of rural workers). The latifundium should therefore not be confused with uncultivated land or with large agricultural estates that are intensively cultivated, whether or not they are divided into smallholdings.
The latifundium was considered a grave scourge afflicting Italy from the time of ancient Rome, despite the famous agrarian reforms of the Gracchi, in relation to a particular political and social conception according to which manual labor was despised by the Roman citizen of the classical age, and rural economy was based predominantly on slave labor.
The latifundium was increased not only by the holdings of cities, municipalities, and the Caesars (ager publicus), which were almost exclusively devoted to pastoralism, but also by the increasingly frequent sales of land by small owners, burdened with debt, to powerful Roman patricians enriched by continuous military campaigns. These patricians, thanks to their immense financial resources, cared little about the rational exploitation of their landed properties.
The latifundium survived the fall of the Roman Empire and the disappearance of the slave economy; it persisted through the Middle Ages amid Gothic and Byzantine invasions and under Norman and Angevin rule. Nor was the problem resolved by the countless, though irrational, redistributions of land to victorious warriors under the regimes 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 legal and social conceptions, the latifundium still persists in vast areas of Sicily, southern Italy, Lazio, and the Tuscan Maremma.
However, the phenomenon has never been, nor is it now, exclusively Italian, as it has occurred and continues to occur in all European countries and beyond, even in those that are more advanced; and everywhere it presents the same disadvantages.
Hence the problem of abolishing the latifundium, considered by all to be of the utmost urgency (cf. Settimana Sociale di Napoli [cited in bibliography], p. 274; National Catholic Rural Life Conference of the United States in Documentation Catholique, 1948, col. 754; Union de Malines, in Cahiers d'Action religieuse et sociale, 1950, p. 143). Hence also the Church’s preference for the family farm, which better ties the peasant to his land, reduces the pernicious scourge of urbanization, intensifies production because it awakens and sharpens the farmer’s interest, and preserves the family in a healthier state (cf. Pius XII, Exhortation to Direct Cultivators, in Discorsi e radiomessaggi, VIII, 1946–1947, Vatican City 1947, pp. 301–309).
On the other hand, Christian social doctrine conceives the right to property not in an absolutist sense or as an end in itself, but as an instrument for the perfection and expression of human personality, framing it within an organic conception of social life that does not admit any exclusion—with the advantage of a few—from the enjoyment of the goods indispensable to the community, such as land.
Naturally, any change in the land tenure system in latifundium areas can never yield fruitful results unless it is preceded and accompanied by adequate technical and economic measures capable of enabling modern agriculture to be practiced in those regions.
It is for the State, which in a socially Christian democracy cannot remain aloof from the problems of production and labor, to implement a comprehensive plan for public works, roads, and hydraulic projects, along with the adoption of appropriate hygienic and sanitary measures, so that colonists settling on those lands, long abandoned and uncultivated, may enjoy a decent standard of living, which will endear them to the land and allow them to live honestly from their own labor.
Individual initiative, on the other hand, will be entrusted with carrying out all those works that pertain more specifically to the farm, such as planting, land reclamation, water regulation, and the construction of barns and farmhouses, under penalty of forced expropriation for non-compliance in favor of colonization agencies, cooperatives, or small direct cultivators.
In the field of agricultural contracts, a fairer regulation of lease agreements, the suppression of middlemen, and the gradual elimination of wage labor through the establishment of family-based sharecropping relationships—wherever this is feasible—should mark a first step toward the spread of small peasant property, a factor of economic well-being and social tranquility.
Conversely, since the phenomenon of excessive fragmentation often occurs precisely where the true latifundium exists—resulting directly from the poverty of the rural masses and giving rise to the so-called peasant latifundium—appropriate regulations must be enacted to consolidate small, fragmented properties and prevent further subdivisions in the event of alienation or inheritance, so as to achieve a land tenure system capable of finally satisfying the technical and productive requirements and the pressing demand for land among rural classes.
Moreover, the solution to the problem is linked to a substantial reform of customs that will awaken in landowners a sense of their social duties and confidence in a better future, and in agricultural workers a desire to become competent and ever more harmonized with the common good.