Villavicencio-Pinto: Property Regimes and Climate Adaptation
In Beyond the Agro-export Boom: The Challenges of Land Concentration and Fragmentation in Chile, Eduardo Villavincencio-Pinto (Kent Law School, UK) examines the rural property regime in modern Chile and its implications for how the country can meet the challenges of climate change. The author conducted a study of rural Chilean property ownership, evaluating two main trends: land concentration and land fragmentation. Employing a historical, cartographic, and socio-legal approach, Villavincencio-Pinto shows how both trends have had negative effects on the rural landscape in Chile and challenges the sustainability of this foundational system.
The article notes that during the 1970s, Chile’s property ownership system underwent what he describes as a neoliberal reform, leading to the commodification of property as a market asset and its detachment from the traditional social role of property ownership. This approach facilitated the agro-export boom in Chile and provided greater legal certainty to landowners through a more individualistic and absolute conception of private property rights. However, Villavincencio-Pinto asserts that, in the face of climate change’s growing uncertainties, this current system of land ownership may be insufficient to address future needs.
The author found that land concentration in rural Chile has accelerated over time, peaking in 2021 with a rate that exceeds global averages. As increasing amounts of land are owned by a small percentage of the overall population, rural communities struggle to address growing climate change challenges, since greater concentration of land negatively affects collective adaptive capacity. Land fragmentation has also grown, with small- and large-parcel landowners alike increasingly subdividing their farmland for commercial and residential use. This presents additional challenges to rural communities, including substantial population growth in rural areas that lack the current infrastructure and capacity for such growth. Agricultural land loss is also a concern for rural areas, threatening both food security and Chile’s agricultural economy.
While the modern Chilean property system has promoted agricultural investment and export growth, Villavincencio-Pinto worries that land concentration and land fragmentation trends contribute to a lack of flexibility needed to address climate change. Villavincencio-Pinto argues that future policy initiatives rethinking rural property and land use are needed to protect the rural landscape into the future.
