Data Data journalism
The cadastre that nobody updates
The largest 20% of productive units hold 93.5% of Bolivia's farmland, and the agrarian distribution left 39 families with 600,000 of those hectares.
By Violeta Ayala — Tecnóloga Creativa
Sheet 01 · Cadastre
The 2013 National Agricultural Census established that the largest twenty per cent of agricultural holdings concentrate 93.5% of the country's land in production: 32.4 million hectares. The remaining 80% hold 6.5%, barely 2.2 million. It is the most recent official figure available, and it is thirteen years old.
Research collected in Santa Cruz S.A. Agronegocio y mito empresarial, published this year by Dum Dum Editora, supplies the origin of that curve: it identifies 39 people and families recorded as having received roughly 600,000 hectares over the course of the agrarian reform process. Around 1.6% of all land in production in Bolivia, held by 39 family units.
1,000 cells = 34.6 M hectares in production · National Agricultural Census 2013, the most recent available
This is the ratio the 1953 agrarian reform said it would eliminate. The land-titling process that followed the 1996 INRA Law ended up legalising it in the lowlands, where clearing title on medium and large holdings was never a political priority for any government, of any stripe.
| Department | Population | /km² |
|---|---|---|
| Santa Cruz | 3,122,605 | 8.4 |
| La Paz | 3,030,917 | 22.6 |
| Cochabamba | 2,016,357 | 36.4 |
| Potosí | 861,292 | 7.3 |
| Chuquisaca | 606,027 | 11.8 |
| Oruro | 571,471 | 10.8 |
| Tarija | 534,210 | 14.2 |
| Beni | 488,260 | 2.3 |
| Pando | 134,194 | 2.1 |
| Bolivia | 11,365,333 | 10.3 |
| Indicator | Value |
|---|---|
| Years in trade deficit | 25 of 26 |
| Cumulative deficit | ≈ USD 20 bn |
| Only year in surplus | 2022 |
The figure dismantles the central premise of economic regionalism. A department that imports more than it exports in twenty-five of twenty-six years can be many things. Self-sufficient is not one of them.
That emptiness is the asset. Whoever controls 648,000 sparsely populated square kilometres controls the agricultural frontier, export cattle, timber, gold, and soil as a financial instrument.
Three sides, not two
Agro-industrial and cattle elite
Demographically tiny, territorially dominant. Owner of the 93.5%. Its public account holds that it built itself alone, against a centralist state. The book documents the opposite.
Interculturales
Andean-origin peasant communities settled in the lowlands since the 1950s, with larger waves after the 1985 mining layoffs. Fundación Tierra counts 1,468 communities across some 2.4 M hectares in Santa Cruz.
Lowland Indigenous peoples
Chiquitano, Guaraní, Ayoreo, Guarayo, Mojeño, Tsimane', Movima, Cavineño, Yuracaré. Small in the census, vast in territory: titled Indigenous territories total between 20.7 and 24 M hectares.
Two of those three sides make up the overwhelming demographic majority of the east. The third holds the land.
The hole in the file
One weakness is worth stating plainly. The ninety-three point five per cent figure dates from 2013. Everything that followed, soy expansion, the export cattle boom, the titling of settlements, the fires of 2019 and 2024, and land price speculation, is not in it.
A new agricultural census is the only instrument capable of measuring how far that concentration has moved, and it is probably the most politically expensive document the Bolivian state could produce. Until it exists, every side argues blind, except the one that already knows its own hectares.
Sources · National Agricultural Census 2013 · Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2024 Population and Housing Census · Stasiek Czaplicki Cabezas, Suzanne Kruyt, José Octavio Orsag Molina, Blanca Rivero Lobo and Huáscar Salazar Lohman, Santa Cruz S.A. Agronegocio y mito empresarial (Dum Dum Editora, 2026), Centro de Estudios Populares · Fundación Tierra · INRA.