The sharecropping system that defined land tenure in the Ecuadorian highlands prior to agrarian reform was known as the ‘huasipungo’, a Quechua word that describes the relationship between landlords and tenant farmers. The end of this feudal system had a radically different outcome when compared to Peru and Bolivia, however, because landowners preempted the confiscation of their lands by expelling tenant farmers. Owners mechanised farm operations and turned to contract labour, while thousands of peasant families were evicted from their homes. Some moved to urban centres, but many chose to migrate to the agricultural frontiers in the tropical lowlands of the Amazon and the Pacific coast. The official effort to promote settlements in the Ecuadorian Amazon began in 1957 when the democratically elected government created the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC). In 1964, a military government enacted the Ley de Reforma Agraria y Colonización, which merged the INC into the newly created Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (IERAC). Between 1964 and 1994, IERAC distributed about five million hectares (12.35 million acres) of land with support from USAID and the Alliance for Progress; about 1.8 million hectares (4.45 million acres) were located in the five Amazonian provinces. Land was distributed in forty-hectare plots, which suggests that about 45,000 families acquired plots in the Amazon during this 30-year period. The Ecuadorian provinces of Succumbios and Orellana were opened to settlement in the 1960s with the discovery of oil. By the 1980s, the distribution of 40-hectare (98.8 acres) landholdings was well…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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