"And great lands without irrigation,
thirsty for sowing, thirsty
for the hands of the farmer."
Rafael Alberti.
At the beginning of the third millennium, Andalusia still suffers from an agrarian problem whose origin is estimated to lie in the persistence of latifundismo in the region. The Andalusian situation has no equivalent in Europe, where the agrarian question, based on the reform of productive structures and land ownership and the anachronism of agricultural unemployment, seems to have been resolved decades ago.
The problem has been known since the latifundios, as we know them now, began to form. But it has been the assessments of latifundismo made in the last two hundred years, with a social and economic perspective, that have opened the controversy surrounding the role and responsibility that latifundios have had in the irregular evolution of economic growth and development in Andalusia. Even so, the enlightened and liberals tried to remove the obstacles that hindered the increase of production and the liberalization of the land market, leaving intact, if not reinforced, the existing latifundismo. It was the great changes that occurred in the final decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th that raised in their proper dimension the scope of the agrarian reconversion that would have to be undertaken: population increase, mechanization, fertilizers, the collapse of prices, etc., and above all the need to increase productivity demanded from the most backward European agricultures profound changes in the productive system. Spain joined this modernization slowly and belatedly, and the dysfunctions that this caused were felt more intensely in the Guadalquivir valley, as the alternative options of early emigration or the transfer of agricultural labor to industrial activities were not sufficient, as in other regions. In this situation, in areas of latifundios, the consequence will be agricultural unemployment.
There have been many hypotheses and theories that have tried to demonstrate, from the genesis and formation of latifundios, what may be the reason for the stability and permanence of the system. It is true that alongside it, it has also been wanted to see how, from the control and monopoly that landowners make of the land, derives the foundation of power in latifundista-type societies, just as the social prestige that land ownership entails has been invoked to justify, in the last ratio, the stability and permanence of said system.
Given the special nature of the land, from a social point of view, the excessive concentration of it becomes a dysfunctional phenomenon because of the way the product is distributed, because of the unemployment it induces and because of the control of power that is exercised from the land. And it is invoking such precepts that in the reformist stages of the past century the liquidation of the latifundios has been requested.
As in the past, the problem of agricultural unemployment has reappeared and even worsened when it was considered as a residual element of a traditional agrarian society that had finally managed to modernize after the intense emigration of the decades in 1950 and 1960 and the fleeting industrial takeoff of the south that occurred in those same years. And it is in this perspective that latifundismo is required to assume this problem and provide adequate solutions.
The issue, then, returns to where it was at the beginning: is agriculture, in Andalusia, due to the system of ownership and exploitation of the land, the determining factor that limits economic reactivation and growth? It does not seem that latifundios are solely responsible for the Andalusian backwardness, despite being the most characteristic differential element of the region, but also should be considered a kind of shared responsibility of which would not be exempt the two resounding industrialization failures undertaken in the south, as well as the action of the State itself. However, it is no less true that at concrete and immediate levels, it is latifundismo who, by its very nature, maintains the survival of the agricultural proletariat and while it subsists the risk of chronic unemployment, which in times like the present, can not be easily cleared. And as the poet said: "To have hunger, to be unemployed, / dead hands fallen, / costs the man very dearly".
Francisco Arias Solis
