The word latifundio comes from the Latin latifundium, which means large-scale farm or rustic farm, which means that a large-scale estate is an area of large dimensions and of agricultural exploitation that has only one owner, who is called a landlord. It is important to clarify that in these areas the resources are not fully exploited.
The history of the formation of latifundia dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the colonizers and military conquerors (such as the creation of the Old Roman Empire, the Germanic invasions, the Spanish reconquest and the colonization of the American continent by the Europeans) promoted the creation of these large areas to exploit their wealth generating great changes at the socio-economic and political level.
The criteria needed to define a large estate may vary, because there is no fixed number of hectares that transform a field at this level, instead, it depends on the location in which it is located and the practices associated with it. agricultural production that are applied to it.
On the European continent, with only having a few hundred hectares, a field can be converted into a large estate. For its part, the Latin American continent does not have the same advantage, due to the fact that the agricultural exploitation is greater than the European one, for a Latin field to be considered latifundia, it must have at least 10,000 hectares under its belt. It is important to note that when the farms are on a smaller scale, the areas are called minifundios.
In the economic and social sphere, large estates are characterized by being farms in precarious conditions, devoid of technology, with low unit yields and the use of the land is usually well below the maximum level of exploitation. These characteristics are the reason why these areas tend to promote or maintain social instability in a nation. One of the solutions that the governments of the countries in which they are located resort to is agrarian reform, which implies the structural modification of property, including expropriation.
