Agricultural Reform in Spain (1931-32)

Agrarian reform was one of the key priorities of Azana's government between 1931-33. Rural poverty was a huge problem in Spain - peasants worked the land on vast estates known as 'Latifundia' and had very little protection over rights and pay. Labourers often worked for as long as 16 hours a day and most workers were only seasonally employed, meaning the pay they received from landowners was not enough to get them through the months when they might be unemployed.

Reform was instigated by minister for labour, Largo Caballero, and focussed on redistributing land to peasants and improving the pay and working conditions of rural labourers. Reforms included:

• Introduction of an eight-hour work day
• Workers given legal right to overtime pay
• Law of Municipal Boundaries - this outlawed the employment of workers from outside each municipality. It was designed to stop the undercutting of wages through the employment of cheap migrant labour
• Law of Obligatory Cultivation - land had to be used for arable purposes or else land could be confiscated by the state. The idea behind this reform was to increase food production and create job opportunities in rural areas where unemployment was often high and malnutrition was a problem.
• Wage disputes between landowners and labourers would be settled by committees with representatives from both parties.
• Agrarian Reform Law (1932) - this was the most radical of all agricultural reforms. It aimed to solve the problem of rural poverty by redistributing land to peasants. Landowners were allowed to keep up to 23 hectares of land - anything over this could be bought by the state and given to peasants in the hope that they could farm themselves out of poverty.

The Failure of Agrarian Reform

Despite the intentions of the government, agrarian reform was largely ineffective for a number of reasons:

• Landowners ignored the reforms as they were designed to empower the workers and so were deeply unpopular
• The Agrarian Reform Law failed because the Institute for Agrarian Reform, the group tasked with enforcing the law, was poorly funded and organized. Thus, it resettled just 10% of the peasants that the government thought were in need of support.
• Landowners were hostile to the Agrarian Reform Law anyway, viewing it as an attack on their property rights which had previously been vehemently protected by Primo de Rivera.
• The effects of the Great Depression meant that any improvements to the lives of rural workers were undermined by wider economic difficulties within Spain. It also meant that the government did not have the means to fully enforce new laws that protected the rights and pay of peasants.

Agrarian reform failed to satisfy the demands of rural workers and trade unions and thus many previous supporters of the Second Republic became increasingly disillusioned. Meanwhile, reforms lead to a rise in support for right-wing parties such as CEDA amongst landowners as CEDA leader Gil-Robles promised to undo the changes.