Estatuto da Terra (Brazil)

The Estatuto da Terra, or Land Statute, is Brazilian Law 4,504, enacted on November 30, 1964, in the early months of the military government of President Castelo Branco. It was drafted by a team of agronomists, jurists and other specialists and was intended to serve two purposes at once, agrarian reform and the promotion of agricultural development, at a time when rural unrest and peasant land movements had been growing under the previous government. The law introduced legal definitions that remain part of Brazilian land law, including the social function of land, the minimum viable rural holding, and the categories of undersized and oversized landed estates, and it set out mechanisms for acquiring and expropriating unproductive land. In practice the statutes agrarian reform provisions were only partially carried out, and the underlying concentration of land ownership in Brazil was not substantially reduced by the law.