Beyond the agro-export boom: The challenges of land concentration and fragmentation in Chile

This study conceptualizes Chile's rural property regime as a neoliberal infrastructure confronting the deep uncertainty of climate change. By decoupling productive and social functions, this institutional framework has enabled market dynamics and sustained the agro-export model through legal certainty. However, its emphasis on individual rights and market efficiency now faces an unprecedented challenge: the uncertainty in productive conditions, environmental thresholds, and adaptation requirements inherent in climate change. Conceptualizing property as a system that organizes spaces based on power distribution, I employ historical, cartographic, and socio-legal analyses to examine how this tension manifests territorially. The findings reveal the historical consolidation of extreme land concentration, alongside significant loss of agricultural land to real estate markets due to fragmentation. These phenomena involve both small and large landowners, albeit with varying degrees of intensity and participation, demonstrating how the neoliberal property infrastructure enables simultaneous processes that potentially undermine the country's food security and agro-export capacity. I challenge the sustainability of this infrastructure, arguing that its rigid pursuit of certainty—rooted in its individual, absolute, and exclusive nature—impedes the design and implementation of coordination and territorial planning policies crucial for addressing climate and food security challenges. This research provides empirical evidence and conceptual elements to rethink rural property and land use policies in the context of deep uncertainty, contributing to debates about territorial planning and sustainable rural development in the face of environmental change.