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absentee owners. Regional agencies of the Cassa took over large estates and subdivided them. In some cases they pay for the land at the value the owner had declared in his last tax statement, a price that amused the reformers more than it did the landowners. Since 1950 about 700,000 hectares (2,700 square miles) have been distributed to about 100,000 peasant families.

Much more has been involved than redistribution, however: land has been reclaimed from waste and marsh, eroded slopes have been planted to trees or other vegetation; roads, water mains, sewers, irrigation systems, and powerplants have been built, cooperatives organized, and social services established.

The most spectacular changes occurred where the land could be irrigated. A tract planted in tree crops (oranges, peaches, pears, or apricots) or in tobacco or market gardens can easily return 10 times as much as the old wheat and olives. In the irrigated plains small new houses, each on its own land (generally 4 or 5 hectares), line the new roads, where cars and motorbikes and small tractors outnumber donkey carts.

Not all areas have flourished; the coast south of Crotone, for example, still produces little except meager crops of wheat. The poor gray soils, sticky and unworkable in winter, parched and dusty in summer, could not be irrigated, and one our of three of the newly installed farmers gave up after 2 or 3 years.

On the island of Sardinia the land reform gave mixed results. About 65,000 hectares were expropriated, divided, and turned over to 3,900 families who were moved from overcrowded villages to new government-built farmhouses. Mistakes were numerous; some land was unsuitable, some farms too small, and some settlers totally unsuited to the life; hundreds of houses were abandoned. Some settlers thrived, however, especially the "Tunisians" (farmers of Sicilian descent expelled from Tunisia). Resourceful and skilled at fruit farming, they were assigned after 1962 to some of the abandoned reform-farms. There they planted orchards, irrigated them with wells they sank themselves, and created profitable, well-kept farms with splendidly decorated farmhouses. Some neighbors are following their example, but others still live at the subsistence level, raising a little wheat, olives, and forage for a few sheep and goats.

Sicily had its own land reform law, and reform has not been effective. Much of its budget has gone to pay the 3,000 employees, whose efforts endowed Sicily with several thousand isolated farmsteads (generally a house on a few hectares of rocky infertile upland that could not support a family), most of which have remained uninhabited. Rural poverty there is still the most severe in Italy. In the interior the people still live in peasant cities—some contain as many as 40,000

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080001-6