Meghan Morris
Meghan Morris is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on regulation of land and labor through agrarian reform, the mobilization of law and science within such reforms, and their social and ecological effects. She has conducted research on legal strategies and campaigns for land restitution in Colombia’s banana region, and her dissertation project focuses on Cuban agrarian reform. Morris holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Masters in International Relations from The Fletcher School, and has been involved in environmental justice and human rights work in South America for over a decade. Contact: mlmorris@uchicago.edu |
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Research on Land-grabbing:
Cuba’s Law 259: land redistribution, agricultural restructuring and alternative development
The centrality of the regulation of land and labor to Cuban agriculture, and of agriculture to the Cuban economy, has been apparent for centuries, from the island’s historical position as a site of colonial sugar plantations to the government’s recent attempts to institute and rework socialism through agrarian reform. Cuba’s most recent wave of agricultural restructuring came as part of a package of economic reforms issued by Raúl Castro’s government in 2008. Most notably, this package includes Law 259, which authorizes the distribution of idle land in renewable usufruct for ten years to individuals who commit to using it in a “rational and sustainable” manner for agricultural production. Since this reform took force, the government has distributed over a million hectares – nearly 20% of the island’s cultivable land – to existing cooperative farmers and parceleros, a steadily growing group of non-cooperativized individuals involved in agricultural production. My research will examine the political, economic, ecological, and social effects of this 2008 restructuring as one of the most significant agricultural reforms in Cuba’s recent history.
