PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP. — The landholding system based on small peasant proprietorship brings together in the same hands all the factors of production. The rural property, with its appurtenances, which constitutes the central nucleus of the agricultural enterprise, belongs to the same peasant family that cultivates it by the labor of its own hands.
Peasant proprietorship is rightly considered the socioeconomic form of rural life best suited to fostering the worker’s attachment to and bond with the land, developing his personality and his sense of order and social responsibility, and freeing him from all external supervision. Moreover, it tends to eliminate entirely the causes of conflict between capital and labor, introducing into the production cycle the peasant proprietor with all the rights and obligations proper to the small agricultural entrepreneur.
The regime of family collaboration governing small peasant proprietorship allows the rational exploitation of the working capacities of the elderly, women, and children, through the performance of simpler, though nevertheless necessary, functions in the conduct of the farm, which supplement the normal activity of its more capable members, under the coordinating direction of the head of the household.
It should therefore not cause 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 tenant farmers merely as an instrument of political propaganda preparing the way for the proletarian dictatorship and state collectivism.
Not all agricultural areas, however, are equally suited to this system of management. Small peasant proprietorship finds its natural center of diffusion wherever the nature of the crops and the soil does not require the large-scale employment of capital and technical assistance, means available only to the large industrialized enterprise.
Undoubtedly, the cooperative management of machinery and of facilities 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 nature (D. L. 24 Feb. 1948, no. 114, amended by D. L. 5 May 1948, no. 1242, and L. 29 July 1949, no. 473), can contribute to solving the agrarian social problem by strengthening small peasant proprietorship, in application of the principles enshrined in the new Italian Constitution (art. 44: « ... the law assists small proprietorship... »; art. 47: « ... the Republic promotes the access of popular savings to direct peasant proprietorship »).
The Holy Father Pio 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 to grant private property, if possible, to all ».
The Civil Code as well (art. 846 on the minimum cultivable unit) is oriented, moreover, toward preventing the subdivision of landed property, in cases of inheritance divisions and transfers, whether onerous or gratuitous, of ownership or of the establishment of real rights
concerning land suitable for cultivation. In fact, this phenomenon makes the building, hydraulic, and road organization of rural properties more complex; makes the use of machinery, crop rotation, and the execution of land-reclamation and land-improvement works more difficult; and hinders technical and productive progress, causing the impoverishment and proletarianization of small farmers.
The aforementioned art. 846 of the Civil Code specifies that « the minimum cultivable unit is to be understood as the extent of land necessary and sufficient for the work of a tenant-farming family and, where it is not land organized as a farm, for carrying out suitable cultivation according to the rules of sound agricultural technique ».
The social aspect of peasant proprietorship is manifested above all in the need to ensure cultivators instruction and professional training, as well as moral and family education, in order to guarantee them, with the cooperation of the State, the civic and technical preparation necessary for the discharge of the new and delicate functions awaiting the small direct-cultivating proprietor.
Above all, it is necessary to prevent small landed property from becoming a closed economy, as occurred in Italy during the feudal period, to the grave detriment of the national community, or from placing itself outside agricultural progress and technique by continuing to use traditional means and methods that are no longer suited to meeting the requirements of modern agriculture.
The land reform recently applied in Italy through the stralcio reform law (law of 21 Oct. 1951, no. 841), in various national territories capable of agricultural and land transformation, seeks to replace a system of farm management based on extensive concentration of landholdings with new small peasant properties that, through the most varied forms of cooperatives and assistance, may find the possibility of mutual and reciprocal support.
Moreover, the same direction that seems to be prevailing in the reform of legislation governing agricultural contracts is aimed at transforming the various labor relations into as many instruments for the advancement of the peasant masses toward ownership of the land, thereby satisfying an aspiration now centuries old, not only through a different distribution of products in sharecropping and the arbitration-based determination of a fair rent in leasing, for better remuneration of agricultural labor and the spread of savings, but above all through the legal recognition of the tenant farmer’s right of pre-emption in the purchase of ownership of the farmstead where he resides and works.