Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0009/00090.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 26KB | 408 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00090}
$Pretitle{244}
$Title{Algeria
Chapter 3C.   Land Use and Ownership}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Fadia Elia Estefan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{land
hectares
million
government
production
tons
farms
percent
agrarian
cooperatives}
$Date{1985}
$Log{Vineyards*0009002.scf
}
Country:     Algeria
Book:        Algeria, A Country Study
Author:      Fadia Elia Estefan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1985

Chapter 3C.   Land Use and Ownership

     More than 90 percent of Algeria's land surface consists of arid plateaus,
mountains, and desert. The land suitable for agriculture, including areas
brought under grazing and forest cover, totaled about 42.5 million hectares.
Only about 7.5 million hectares are suitable for crops, and the vast balance
is pasture and scrubland. Agricultural land located in the Algerian Sahara is
mostly rough grazing land; some 50,000 hectares are in crops and orchards at
the occasional oases. Of the absolute amount of arable land, only about 4.6
million hectares were cultivated in the mid-1980s; of the total, some 250,000
hectares were irrigated and the balance was held in fallow. Most of the arable
land is located in northern Algeria between the Mediterranean Sea and the
southern slopes of the Saharan Atlas mountain range, an area that lies between
the 60-centimeter and 15-centimeter annual rainfall lines. As much as 25
percent of this part of the country is arable. At independence the breakdown
of northern Algeria's agricultural sector into areas above and below the
60-centimeter rainfall line coincided roughly with a technological breakdown
of the sector into colonial (or modern) and traditional subsectors. Before
independence the colonial sector was for the most part owned and operated by
colons (see Glossary). Throughout the colonial period this technologically
modern sector provided the bulk of agricultural exports.

     The land tenure system had been altered both by the French colonial
administration and by independence. Before the colonial period, agriculture
was the economic life of the country, and land tenure laws were the only
economic laws. These were highly complex and were derived from a mixture of
Islamic law, Berber customary usage, and Turkish administration. During the
colonial era the French policy was designed to enlarge the amount of public
land available for distribution to French settlers and to protect the land
rights of such settlers. Numerous legal techniques, devices, and stratagems
were invoked by the French to expand landownership. Considering itself the
heir to Turkish state land, the French colonial administration expropriated
all vacant, uncultivated land during the 1844-46 period, including land being
held fallow. Many Algerian landowners neglected to file forms indicating they
had ownership of the uncultivated land and thereby lost their property rights,
although some of them were later given small concessions of land from the
public domain and were designated as Arab colonists to distinguish them from
the colons. Later land laws also helped to accelerate the breakup of Algerian
landownership, as did the need to raise capital to pay taxes and repay loans
in bad crop years. The process continued almost up to independence: by the
mid-1950s there were 20 percent fewer Algerian landowners than there had been
in 1930.

     At the time of independence in 1962, Europeans owned about 22,000 farms
totaling about 2.2 million hectares of cropland and 400,000 hectares of forest
or unproductive land. Algerian farmowners numbered 631,000 and held 4.7
million hectares of cropland plus 6.3 million hectares of forest and
unproductive land. The European owners, managers, and technical staffs of most
of the farms fled Algeria almost immediately after independence and abandoned
about half the farmland. All remaining European land was nationalized in two
stages in April and May 1963. The danger to the economy precipitated by the
exodus was met in the first instance by a rallying of farmworkers, who seized
control of the farms in order to resist any attempted invasion by outside
squatters and to carry on the production routines to which they were
accustomed. Leadership was provided by the remaining farm hierarchy or by
persons who rose from the production ranks to offer stimulus and direction.

     The outcome was the autogestion, or self-management process, that in 1962
and 1963 spontaneously developed and contributed most fortuitously to
extricating the government from what threatened to be a very painful position.
The rapid spread of autogestion not only protected the country's agriculture
from excessive damage but also supplied the government, in the form of a fait
accompli, the core of its socialization program for the agricultural sector,
with little or no additional disturbance and relatively little loss of
productivity.

     At the start, the government acquiesced in the seizure of the farms by
the workers on the assumption that autogestion was only a temporary measure.
The seizures were later legitimated by the government, which provided the
workers with a formula for governing the farms. Although it varied somewhat
for farms of different size and was revised over the years, the formula
basically consisted of a cooperative, of which all permanent workers were
members and eligible to share in the profits. The administrative machinery
comprised a voting assembly of all farmworkers, which met periodically to
establish production and financial policies; a workers' council; and a
management committee selected by the workers' council to oversee and implement
the assembly's decisions. The council and the management committee chose a
president to carry on the day-to-day operations of the farm; the government
appointed a director to act as liaison between the farm and the authorities
and to give the farm's hierarchy technical, financial, and executive
assistance as needed.

     Once the initial confusion surrounding the management of the farms had
been resolved and after the government had nationalized all the remaining
lands that had been French-owned, it modified its original position of turning
ownership of the farms over to the workers. From mid-1966 on, the right to use
of the land remained with the workers, acting through their cooperative
set-up, but ownership resided in the government. Gradually, the government
established effective control of the self-managed farms, which thereafter came
to be known as the socialized subsector. This control enabled the government
to recombine adjacent farm units to ease the implementation of the necessary
changes. The number of socialized farms was progressively reduced to
accommodate the scarcity of management and technical expertise.

     As early as the 1940s the French administrators had recognized that the
landholding pattern was unsatisfactory and required reform. The population
explosion that began after World War II aggravated the situation, and some
distribution of public lands was instituted in the mid-1950s. The program was
abandoned, however, during the war of independence.

     During the immediate postindependence period the government was too
involved with the socialized subsector and with the industrial program to cope
effectively with the deteriorating situation in the private agricultural
subsector. Moreover, the obstructionism of the large, frequently absentee
landowners in that subsector-both before and after independence-apparently
undercut much of the government's reform effort. The change of government in
1965 and the continued growth of the hydrocarbons subsector kept the official
emphasis focused on the development of industry.

     During the late 1960s the new industrial elite apparently recognized that
without a growing internal market for the increasing industrial output, the
planned industrial expansion program would be effectively frustrated.
Apparently, therefore, this elite sought to bring its growing political clout
to bear on the g