Many people in today’s Third World society rely solely on farming in order to survive. However, most Third World agricultural areas are home to the worst conditions imaginable. These areas are often poverty stricken, despite the fact that the peasants supply a considerable share of the gross national product in many underdeveloped nations. The rural regions of Third World nations are often overcrowded and not sanitary, and many inhabitants are unlikely to possess many amenities that people from developed nations take for granted. Many countries, including Mexico, have taken steps toward agrarian reform. By returning power to the peasants, the nations are attempting to reconcile a system gone wrong.

There are many reasons for agrarian reform to take place, such as needs for social justice, higher productivity, environmental preservation, political stability, and economic growth (Handelman 110-113). The five are intertwined with one another, each with its own level of importance, but economic development may be perhaps the most significant argument for agrarian reform. As the “purchasing power (of workers) increases,” they are able to utilize more national goods,

An agricultural structure marked by the misappropriation and concentration of land in Mexico acts as a major barrier to the nation’s economic and social development. In the short term, it inhibits growth of agricultural production and employment, while in the long term, it causes poverty and waste, which tend to be self-perpetuating. “Paternalistic…intervention” in the economy by the government can often impede economic progress rather than enhance fiscal development (Brannon 185). The current political and economic power arrangement of Mexico is “not conducive to a rapid and meaningful political assimilation of its marginal rural population” (Brannon 186).

When a considerable proportion of quality land was really distributed to a majority of the rural poor, with policies favorable to family farming in place and when the power of rural elites to alter policies was broken, the results have included a measurable poverty reduction and improvement in human welfare. The economic successes of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China resulted from such reforms. Even the felling of fragile forests has been slowed, as happened during the 1980s with the now-aborted Sandinista land reform in Nicaragua.

The products produced from these more fertile lands flow overwhelmingly toward consumers in wealthy countries. Impoverished local majorities cannot afford to buy what is grown, and because they are not a noteworthy market, national elites essentially see local people as a labor source, a cost of production to be minimized by keeping wages down and busting unions. The overall result is a downward spiral of land degradation and deepening poverty in rural areas. Even urban problems have rural origins, as the poor must abandon the countryside in massive numbers, migrating to cities where only an auspicious few make a living wage, while the majority languish in slums and shantytowns.

The commitment to ensuring access to land constitutes merely the first part of the program if agrarian reform is to offer a sensible and continuous response to the serious economic and social problems of the agricultural sector in developing countries such as Mexico. The program must continue to be developed over time and encompass actions that will ensure access both to the inputs and infrastructures that allow for a steady enhancement in agricultural efficiency and the promotion of such produce, as well as the enjoyment of the social services that improve people's quality of life and capacity for self-development, and consequently respect for indigenous populations. A final factor that is vital for the success of an agrarian reform is that it should be in full agreement with domestic policies and those of international bodies.

Essentially, Mexico’s efforts at agrarian reform have failed in their assorted aims at reducing the concentration of landholdings, of creating farm units capable of autonomous growth, and of preventing the expulsion of large masses of peasant farmers from the land and their migration to urban centers or to land that is still free, but which may be marginal and poor in social infrastructures. Mexico is in a group of nations, including India, Kenya, and the Philippines, with agrarian structures that result in “increases in agricultural output and (no) reductions in rural poverty” (Binswanger 1960). Large landowners and bureaucrats have reduced the efficiency of public spending, which has eroded the basis for long-term growth.

But the situation is often worse on the more favorable lands. The better soils are concentrated into large holdings used for mechanized, pesticide, and chemical fertilizer-intensive production for export. Many of our planet's best soils, which had earlier been sustainably managed by pre-colonial traditional agriculturalists, are today being rapidly degraded, and in some cases abandoned completely, in the short-term pursuit of export profits and competition. The productive capacity

Some topics in this essay:
Third World, Mexico United, Adaptations Mexican, Reforms Article, Kenya Philippines, Vargas Mexico, Africa Asia, NAFTA Mexico, President Salinas, Mexico Philippines, agrarian reform, article 27, reforms article 27, reforms article, economic development, land ownership, land market, developing countries, mexican government, putting land, purchasing power, division land ownership, poor quality land, putting land market, economic growth handelman,