Abstract
Land tenure inequity is a major social problem in developing nations worldwide. In societies, where land is a commodity, inequities in land tenure are associated with gaps in income distribution, poverty and biodiversity loss. A common pattern of land tenure inequities through the history of civilization has been the formation of latifundia [Zhuāngyuán in chinese], i.e., a pattern where land ownership is concentrated by a small fraction of the whole population. Here, we use simple Markov chain models to study the dynamics of latifundia formation in a heterogeneous landscape where land can transition between forest, agriculture and recovering land. We systematically study the likelihood of latifundia formation under the assumption of pre-capitalist trade, where trade is based on the average utility of land parcels belonging to each individual landowner during a discrete time step. By restricting land trade to that under recovery, we found the likelihood of latifundia formation to increase with the size of the system, i.e., the amount of land and individuals in the society. We found that an increase of the transition rate for land use changes, i.e., how quickly land use changes, promotes more equitable patterns of land ownership. Disease introduction in the system, which reduced land profitability for infected individual landowners, promoted the formation of latifundia, with an increased likelihood for latifundia formation when there were heterogeneities in the susceptibility to infection. Finally, our model suggests that land ownership reforms need to guarantee an equitative distribution of land among individuals in a society to avoid the formation of latifundia.
Highlights
The socialized nature of ecosystem transformation is a major theme of study within the broad field of environmental studies [1,2,3]
When land cover is primarily forested, land tenure can be redistributed for agricultural exploitation, and in turn result in a repeated cycle of agricultural exploitation, malaria transmission and latifundia formation [8]
We found the assumption of a discounted land utility, i.e., that disease reduce the profits from land use, was a plausible driver of latifundia formation under conditions that would otherwise never lead to inequities in patterns of land ownership
Summary
The socialized nature of ecosystem transformation is a major theme of study within the broad field of environmental studies [1,2,3]. An additional insight from the study of the association between malaria emergence and deforestation was the correlation of malaria endemicity with the formation of latifundia, i.e., the accumulation of land tenure by a small number of landowners, a pattern observed both in the Agro-Pontino Romano for centuries [8], and Spain during the 1930s [13] It has been suggested, and documented, by the long historical records for the Roman Agro-Pontino [8], that deforestation and agricultural development led to ideal conditions for the development of mosquito vectors of malaria parasites [8], a fact biologically instantiated by ecological research over recent years [12]. Latifundia are detrimental to society as demonstrated by the cliodinamical analysis of societies that declined or disappeared after they promoted the creation of latifundia, e.g., ancient Rome [19] or that switched from models of land tenure equity to latifundia, e.g., China at the end of the Tang dynasty [20]
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