CULTIVATING PROPERTY. - The land system based on small peasant property makes it possible to unite in the same hands all the factors of production. The farm, with its appurtenances, which constitutes the central nucleus of the agricultural holding, belongs to the same peasant family that cultivates it with the labor of its own hands.
Peasant property is rightly considered the socio-economic form of rural life best suited to attach and bind the worker to the land, developing his personality and his sense of order and social responsibility, and freeing him from all external control. It also tends to eliminate entirely the grounds for conflict between capital and labor, bringing the peasant proprietor into the cycle of production with all the rights and obligations that are proper to the small agricultural entrepreneur.
The system of family collaboration that sustains small peasant property permits the rational exploitation of the working capacities of the old, of women and of children, through the performance of simpler functions, yet ones still necessary to the conduct of the holding's life, which supplement the normal activity of the more able members, under the coordinating action of the head of the family.
It should therefore cause no surprise that this institution has always been opposed not only by conservative currents, but also by movements inspired by Marxist ideologies, which intend to use the distribution of land to the settlers merely as an instrument of political propaganda preparing the way for the proletarian dictatorship and state collectivism.
Not all agrarian zones, however, are equally suited to this system of management. Small peasant property finds its natural center of diffusion where the nature of the crops and of the soil does not require extensive use of capital and technical assistance, means that only the large industrialized holding can command.
Undoubtedly the cooperative management of machinery and of plants for the storage and processing of products, agricultural credit, the establishment of rural banks, as well as the numerous legislative measures already in force, of a fiscal character (D. L. 24 Feb. 1948, no. 114 as amended by D. L. 5 May 1948, no. 1242 and L. 29 July 1949, no. 473), can contribute to the solution of the agrarian social problem through the strengthening of small peasant property, in application of the principles sanctioned by the new Italian Constitution (art. 44: "... the law aids small property..."; art. 47: "... the Republic favors the access of popular savings to direct peasant property").
The Holy Father Pius XII, developing the principles of Christian social morality, has repeatedly reaffirmed as a requirement of the dignity of the human person and a natural foundation for living "the right to the use of the goods of the earth, to which corresponds the fundamental obligation of granting private property, possibly to all."
The Civil Code too (art. 846 on the minimum cultural unit), moreover, is oriented toward preventing the subdivision of landed property, in the case of hereditary divisions and transfers, whether for consideration or gratuitously, of property or of the creation of rights in rem concerning land susceptible of cultivation. Indeed this phenomenon makes the building, water and road arrangement of farm lands more complex, the use of machinery, crop rotation and the execution of land reclamation and improvement works more difficult, and hinders technical productive progress, causing the impoverishment and proletarianization of small farmers.
The aforementioned art. 846 of the Civil Code specifies that "by minimum cultural unit is to be understood the extent of land necessary and sufficient for the work of a settler family and, if it is not land divided into farms, for carrying on a suitable cultivation according to the rules of good agrarian technique."
The social aspect of peasant property manifests itself above all in the need to assure cultivators instruction and professional qualification, moral and family education, so as to guarantee them, with the cooperation of the State, the civic and technical preparation for the fulfillment of the new and delicate functions that await the small proprietor who is a direct cultivator.
Above all it is necessary to prevent small landed property from coming to constitute a closed economy, as happened in Italy in the feudal period, with grave harm to the national community, or from placing itself outside the progress and technique of agriculture, continuing to use traditional means and systems that are no longer suited to satisfying the needs of modern agriculture.
The land reform that has recently been applied in Italy with the partial reform law (law 21 Oct. 1951, no. 841) in various national territories susceptible of agrarian and land transformation, tends to replace a pattern of management based on large landed concentration with new small peasant properties that find in the most varied forms of cooperatives and assistance the possibility of their mutual and reciprocal support.
Moreover, the same direction that seems to prevail in the reform of the legislation on agrarian contracts is aimed at transforming the various labor relationships into so many instruments for the ascent of the peasant masses to the ownership of the land, seconding an aspiration that is by now centuries old, not only through a different distribution of products in sharecropping and the arbitration determination of fair rent in leasing, for a better remuneration of agricultural labor and the spread of savings, but above all through the legal recognition of the right of pre-emption for the settler in the purchase of the property of the farm on which he resides and works.
Bibliography7 works
Bruno Rossi