Many people in today's Third World society rely solely on farming in order to survive. However, most Third World agricultural areas are home to the worst conditions imaginable. These areas are often poverty stricken, despite the fact that the peasants supply a considerable share of the gross national product in many underdeveloped nations. The rural regions of Third World nations are often overcrowded and not sanitary, and many inhabitants are unlikely to possess many amenities that people from developed nations take for granted. Many countries, including Mexico, have taken steps toward agrarian reform. By returning power to the peasants, the nations are attempting to reconcile a system gone wrong.

There are many reasons for agrarian reform to take place, such as needs for social justice, higher productivity, environmental preservation, political stability, and economic growth (Handelman 110-113). The five are intertwined with one another, each with its own level of importance, but economic development may be perhaps the most significant argument for agrarian reform. As the "purchasing power (of workers) increases," they are able to utilize more national goods, thus

When communal lands are privatized, as in Mexico and many places in Africa and Asia, increased competition can result in the collapse of community-based resource management systems, leading to accelerated land degradation. The introduction of the individual profit motive, sometimes linked with outside corporations, can produce a new short-term emphasis on extraction-like profit taking, to the omission of other concerns.

Inequities in the division of land ownership and the policies giving rise to and sustaining them are the source of serious obstacles to economic development. Such imbalances and policies can have economic penalties that affect the majority of the population. Adaptations to the Mexican land market, such as political interventions in the market, often directly or indirectly favor large landholdings through indirect subsidies. Such advantages lead to further investment in land, and hence a rise in its price. Consequently, small farmers see their purchasing power for land eroded, as well their chance of improving the efficiency and equity of the land market through normal trading operations.

In the face of such a situation, if the economy and society are to expand harmoniously, a major focus of concern should be an agricultural reform that ensures a different land distribution. The quality and success of development programs extract substantial benefits, in fact, from the mobility of a country's internal resources and their distribution among the various sectors and social groupings. This is the aim of an agrarian reform that ensures access to land, its efficient use and increased employment.

With the reforms to Article 27 came tenure, or land ownership, uncertainty for peasants. Without security for the future, peasants adopt unsustainable land use practices on already marginal lands in order to grow basic subsistence foods. The peasants try to maximize production for subsistence, or if they're lucky profit with little or no concern for the long-term implications of their practices on the land. With this short term planning the land is usually exhausted quickly through the leaching of nutrients, erosion, and the overuse of soil. "The resulting inequality leads to environmental degradation as landless peasants are expelled to the fringes and are forced to over exploit resources to make a living" (Vargas 212). However, Vargas sees the land disproportion as a symptom of the problem of land distribution, which is being compounded by the reforms.

But the situation is often worse on the more favorable lands. The better soils are concentrated into large holdings used for mechanized, pesticide, and chemical fertilizer-intensive production for export. Many of our planet's best soils, which had earlier been sustainably managed by pre-colonial traditional agriculturalists, are today being rapidly degraded, and in some cases abandoned completely, in the short-term pursuit of export profits and competition. The productive capacity of these soils is dropping rapidly due to soil compaction, erosion, water logging, and fertility loss, together with growing resistance of pests to pesticides and the loss of biodiversity.

Thus, if tenure covered resource rights, landowners who used their lands in sustainable ways would be rewarded through higher food prices for organic produce, compensation for standing forest, and other measures that clearly benefit the land and people. Possession ties into the 1992 reforms to Article 27 through its land distribution policies, which makes it easier for large, international companies to buy land, thus pulling Mexico into the global economy. As land disappears into the corporate sector, people are forced onto marginal lands, thus degrading the environment through the scramble for the remaining resources. As Mexico's poor lose their lands, they are left with no alternative but low paying jobs, which are promoted by NAFTA.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2958
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)