• What is agrarian law?
• Sources of agrarian law
• Importance of agrarian law
• Examples of agrarian law
• Mexican agrarian law

We explain what agrarian law is, the interests involved, its sources and importance. In addition, agrarian law in Mexico.

Agrarian law combines conflicting interests such as production and ecology.

What is agrarian law?

The right agrarian is the branch of law that studies and regulates economic relations and social arisen between the different actors involved in agricultural production. That is, we refer to the legal norms and laws that apply in the case of the agricultural exploitation of soils.

Land law is usually the result of a specific agricultural policy in a particular nation, which is in itself a difficult starting point.

Must meet often conflicting interests such as ecology, the agricultural production needs and the social and economic needs of the people in charge of said production, who may well be small producers or large landowners.

In this sense, agrarian law is interested in matters such as agrarian property, roads and rural traffic, the sanitary elements of agricultural production, the regime of agricultural associations, water rights, the regulation of hunting and fishing. , among many others.

Sources of agrarian law

The sources of agrarian law are not very different from those of other branches of the right:

• The habit. Dictated by the traditional way of exploiting the land.
• The rules and the law. That is, the constitutional legal provisions on agricultural matters, especially in cases where there are agrarian laws.
• The jurisprudence. That is, the interpretation of the laws made by the relevant authorities.

Importance of agrarian law

Agrarian law is extremely important in the constitution of nations, since it governs a fundamental economic activity, such as the production of food and primary goods of consumption.

A nation must, above all, guarantee to its citizens the availability of food and basic resources, so that the efficient and effective resolution of conflicts in agricultural matters is usually a priority, especially in those nations that live off the export of their agricultural products.

On the other hand, it is the only branch of law capable of ensuring the rational use of the natural resources renewable of a territory, in which agricultural activity usually has a significant impact. The same occurs with regard to the well-being of the peasant class, which is usually poor and marginalized in many of the nations of the so-called Third World.

Examples of agrarian law

Agrarian law must ensure in situations such as the following, for example:

• Lawsuits between small agricultural producers and large transnational agricultural corporations, especially regarding the use of seeds (transgenic or not, for example).
• The distribution of arable land and the fight against large estates, that is, against the possession of large unused tracts of land.
• Controlling the application of chemicals and fertilizers that have a high environmental impact and human, and that threaten the perpetuity of the farming or against the welfare of rural inhabitants.
• The resolution of disputes between the Condition and the peasant class, as regards Economic politics (duty, taxes, incentives, etc.).

Mexican agrarian law

In 1991, President Salinas took the first step toward agrarian reform.

Since before colonial times, Mexico has tried to make the best use of cultivable lands, just as the different native cultures that depended on the production and exchange of crops did in their own way. products like corn, cotton or cocoa.

The conquest and the imposition of colonial laws modified that original order, imposing a property system that distinguished between the private property of the Spaniards, the property of the Indigenous villages and the properties of the Catholic Church.

This system was naturally lent to the benefit of the castes of can, fostering large estates despite what is contained in the Laws of the Hispanic Indies. Thus, after independence, in Mexico there were laws that protected landowners and marginalized the peasant class, racially identified, in addition, with the original peoples.

Precisely for this reason, the nineteenth century was so conflictive in terms of agrarian law and the dissatisfaction of the peasant class allowed the emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century of the Mexican Revolution, responsible for some of the most profound changes in agriculture in the history of the country.

These changes include the Agrarian Law of January 6, 1915, issued by Venustino Carranza, with total Zapatista spirit. In that period, the National Agrarian Commission was also created in each state of the Mexican federation, and in 1917 the recognition of agricultural Communal Property.

These changes were later deepened, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, who between 1934 and 1940 carried out the largest distribution of land in Mexican history, for its exploitation under the figure of the ejido.

However, the issue of poverty of the Mexican countryside and the tensions inherent to his tenure could never be completely eradicated. In 1991, then-President Carlos Salinas proposed the so-called Salinista Reform, one of the main contemporary steps in Mexico towards a necessary Agrarian Reform.