Priests, Property Rights, and Land Tenure in Brazil

Abstract: We propose a novel instrument for land conflict in Brazil: the number of priests across counties. Catholic priests provided the organizational skills to galvanize the landless peasants to overcome the inherent free-rider problem of large scale land invasions. We also argue that the Landless Peasants Movement, beginning the late 1980s, drew their motivation from the activities of priests. Whereas there is good reason to expect the number of priests to affect the number of conflicts in a given region, there is no apparent reason why the presence of priests would have a direct impact on land tenure. We use a panel for all of the 5,561 counties (municipios) in Brazil in 1985 and 1996 and show that the presence of priests effectively instruments for conflict (security of property rights) and allows for consistent estimation of its impact on land tenure. We estimate the impact of land conflict on land tenure. We test two hypotheses: 1) landowners don’t rent because it prompts land conflict which causes the government to expropriate the land; and 2) changes from labor intensive to capital intensive crops, because of changes in relative prices, has caused fewer rentals. We test our hypotheses for their impact across the various tenure categories.: owners; renters, and squatters inter alia.. Our results have policy implications concerning land reform. To the extent that land conflict reduces land rental it is blocking one of the avenues for economic mobility of farmers.