Who Owns Appalachia?

Landownership and Its Impact

Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force

• Verlag: The University Press of Kentucky
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185743
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Études régionales

Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region's land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region's people.

Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55, 000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights.

The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region—local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging.

Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation.

ONE

Landownership—
A National Issue, An Appalachian Issue

In a rural area, land joins capital, labor, and technology as a crucial ingredient for economic growth. The land and its resources are the underpinning for development. The ownership and use of the land affect the options available for future developments. The relationship of rural people to the land takes on a special meaning in their work, culture, and community life. “Throughout history,” writes one land economist, “patterns of landownership have shaped patterns of human relations in nearly all societies.”¹

In the United States in recent years, the question Who owns the land? has been raised from a number of directions. Gene Wunderlich, an economist for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), describes the trend: “Many groups in recent years have been concerned about the concentration and distribution of wealth in America. This concern often involves the land. Corporate farming, ownership of property by aliens, accessibility of new single-family housing, the effects of real estate investment trusts, and the role of many large American corporations in natural resource and land development—all are phrases which recall the various forms this concern has taken over the last decade.”²

The development of a concern with landownership represents, to some degree, a logical evolution in the nation’s conceptions about the possession of land, and the rights and responsibilities that accompany it. Much of the early settlement and development of the nation’s land carried with it a fierce ethos of the rights of the private property owner. Still today as one land-use scholar writes, “those who control much of our privately held land place extremely high value on individual freedom in doing with and to the land what the owner chooses, often without regard to the effects on the ecological system, neighbors, or the general public.”³ In the twentieth century, though, these laissez-faire attitudes regarding landownership have been challenged by new attitudes recognizing that the use of the land by one owner may affect the livelihood and well-being of others. A complex body of land-use regulations has evolved, seeking to balance the rights of ownership with responsibilities to the environment, the society, and to future generations who must use and live upon the soil.

More recently, debates over use of the land, and distribution of its benefits, have again led to questions about its ownership. One advocate of land reform in America has argued the essential connection between land use and land ownership: “It is ownership—and the economics that surround ownership—that determine whether land is farmed or paved, strip-mined or preserved, polluted or reclaimed. It is ownership that determines where people live and where they work. And, to a great degree, it is ownership that determines who is wealthy in America and who is poor, who exploits and who gets exploited by others.”⁴ Wunderlich, the USDA land economist, puts the implications of landownership even more broadly: “Land is a means for distributing and exercising power.”⁵

In theory, the United States is well-endowed with enough land and resources to meet the needs of its people. Marion Clawson, a leading land-use scholar, points out that “in 1970, the average person in the United States had the products and the use of about eleven acres of land. . . . This land is owned by individuals, by groups and by governments, and it is used by various persons or groups, but all of us benefit, in one way or another, from its existence and from its productivity.”⁶ While all may benefit, studies suggest that some are more likely to benefit—or to control the benefits—than are others. Most of the population lives on the 2 percent of the United States that is classified as residential, and ownership of that land is widely distributed. But, according to best estimates, of all the private land in the United States, some 95 percent is owned by just 3 percent of the population.⁷ Various governmental agencies own almost 42 percent of the land, including vast public lands in Alaska. As few as 568 corporations, according to a USDA study, own or control some 30.7 million acres of land, almost a quarter of all the American land in private hands. Worldwide, these same corporations control almost 2 billion acres—an area larger than Europe.⁸

In many countries, both agrarian and industrial, such concentrated ownership has led to land-reform policies aimed at redistributing the land, or at expanding control by the public sector over allocation of its benefits. Overseas, the United States government has openly supported such land-reform policies. Domestically, however, land reform as such has not emerged as a major policy issue. This prompts one student of rural development to argue, “Ironically the U.S. has been preaching the virtues of land reform to less developed countries since the end of World War II. The forces that resist land reform in Latin America and Asia are similar to the forces that have prevented it from becoming a subject of serious discussion in this country. But for better or for worse, land reform is as much a key to the elimination of rural poverty in America as it is anywhere else on the globe.”⁹

In contrast to the lack of public debate on land-reform questions in the United States, land-use issues in the 1970s have aroused public and governmental concern. Increasingly, uses of the land for agriculture, energy, or recreation compete and conflict with one another. Increasingly, decisions about land uses involve more public scrutiny and regulation. There is growing consensus on the need to know, Who owns the land?

Perhaps the most volatile land-related issue in recent years has concerned agriculture. According to one source, “in the last twenty years, the nation has lost 60 percent of its farms. Ten farmers a day leave the land, and it is estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 farms will disappear for the next twenty years if present trends continue.”¹⁰ Behind this picture is both an internal restructuring of farming (especially a trend toward fewer and larger farms), and a loss of farmland to nonfarm uses. Both are associated with a changing pattern in ownership of American farmland.

There are a number of complex reasons for the changing ownership, including urban sprawl, the economics of farming, and land speculation by nonfarmers. The consequences of the changing ownership are far-reaching. They have to do with the most efficient size and location of farms for production of the nation’s food supply; the social and political, as well as economic consequences of concentrated or monopoly control of food production; the environmental impacts of large-scale agriculture and farm and timber technologies; and the effects of ownership patterns on farm families and farm communities. Such questions cannot be fully explored without answering, Who owns America’s farmland?

The 1974 Census of Agriculture found that almost 40 percent of all private farmland in the United States is owned by nonfarmers.¹¹ As yet there is no complete or satisfactory answer to the question of farmland ownership, but trends are visible, partially documented. One is that farms are increasing in size, “a trend pushed along as much by little farms becoming larger as by big farms becoming bigger.”¹² Part of this change reflects the entrance by corporations and agribusiness into all phases of food production. In California, for instance, a 1970 study by the University of California Extension Service found that 3.7 million acres of California farmland was owned by forty-five corporate farms. Thus, one analyst concludes, “nearly half of the agricultural land in the state and probably three-quarters of the prime irrigated land, is owned by a tiny fraction of the population.”¹³ More recently, there have been widely publicized accounts of growing investments in farmland by pension funds, insurance companies, and other nonfarm investors.¹⁴ A 1981 two-million-dollar study by the USDA found that “government policies which are aimed at helping farmers actually have hastened the trend towards bigger and fewer farms, and jeopardized the future of family ownership.”¹⁵

Some of the most concentrated ownership of land in America is in woodland. Nationally, estimates suggest that over one-half of the forestland is owned by the federal government. Of the remaining, much is held by timber and paper corporations, the degree of such ownership varying from region to region. In New England, corporate ownership of timberland may be the most prevalent. Estimates in Maine suggest that a dozen pulp and paper companies own 52 percent of the state.¹⁶ In upstate New York, the New York Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks found in 1970 that more than 50 percent of the private land studied was owned by 1 percent of the landowners, with three timber companies owning over 100,000 acres each.¹⁷ Over half of the 67 million acres owned by the paper and pulp industry is in the South, though this represents only 18 percent of the region’s total timberland.¹⁸ Many observers expect the control of timberlands by corporations to grow in the South, as companies like Georgia-Pacific move their headquarters from the Northwest back to the region.¹⁹

The impact of farmland loss has been particularly dramatic for certain groups and regions of the country. Black landowners in the South have been particularly hard hit, especially because land serves as one of the most basic resources for the rural black community. “The more than 12 million acres of land in the South owned in full or in part by blacks in 1950 had declined to less than 6 million by 1969. For the same period, the number of black full or part time farmers declined from 193,000 to less than 67,000.”²⁰ While the number of large farms has increased nationally in recent years, the proportion of these owned by blacks remains minuscule. For instance, in 1969, 12 percent of all Southern farms had sales of $20,000 or more, but only 2 percent of nonwhite farms fell into this category. There is little reason to believe that the trend has changed. While white landowners experienced considerable losses during this time, the losses were proportionately greater for black landowners.

In the late 1970s, another public concern, prompting quick congressional response, involved the purchase of farmland by foreign investors. The International Investment Act of 1977 authorized the president to “conduct a survey of the feasibility of establishing a system to monitor foreign direct investment in agriculture, rural and urban property.” A subsequent survey by the USDA found the extent of foreign ownership to be less than one might have expected: less than one-half of 1 percent of American farmland was in foreign hands on 31 October 1979.²¹ Twenty-five states developed some form of legislation limiting foreign investment in American farmland, but some observers question whether the matter of foreign ownership should be distinguished from the broader question of absentee ownership. A deputy assistant secretary of the State Department testified before a congressional subcommittee, “Foreign investment in farmland need not be regarded as a separate issue, distinct from the more general issue of absentee ownership in land and its effect on the viability of the U.S. farm.”

Yet the survey of foreign ownership has not been matched by a similar investigation of absentee ownership with other holding patterns of United States farmland. However one feels about the direction of the trends outlined here, a fuller documentation of farmland ownership is needed before the public policy questions can be adequately explored.

Land use for agriculture (including cropland, grazing land, and timberland) still represents the largest use of rural land in America, yet increasingly important in this era of “energy crisis” is use of the land for extraction and production of energy, especially through mining coal and other energy sources. However, if little is known about ownership of agricultural lands, still less is known about energy lands in America, either their use or ownership. Marion Clawson, in his book America’s Land and Its Uses, wrote, “Mining is an extremely important, though highly localized, use of the land about which we have very little information. Almost no source of data about land use provides information on mining as a land use.”²² In its multimillion-dollar study, the 1980 President’s Coal Commission acknowledged the “land shortages” created in Appalachia, “in part attributable to coal companies, railroads, and other corporations owning much of the coal rich acreage.” However, the commission stopped short of complete analysis, observing that “statistics for land ownership are often buried in inaccessible or untraceable county records.”²³

Slightly more is known of who owns American energy reserves under the land, though that is speculative. The last decade has witnessed growing national concern over the concentrated ownership of these energy resources, particularly by energy conglomerates. As early as 1967, a Federal Trade Commission study disclosed that five major oil companies had acquired coal rights to 2.5 million acres of public and private land. “As of 1970, 29 of the top 50 coal companies had become oil company subsidiaries, and oil companies were busily acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of additional coal lands.”²⁴ By 1980, oil and gas companies owned 41.1 percent of all privately owned coal reserves in the country, according to the President’s Coal Commission. Six of the top ten national coal-reserve owners were primarily owned by large oil and gas companies.²⁵

In addition to these oil and gas interests, the federal government is a major owner of the nation’s coal resources. In the West, where roughly half of the nation’s coal reserves are, the federal government is estimated to own 65 percent of the coal and to control, indirectly, another 20 percent.²⁶ Over the years, leasing policies allowing the development of these reserves by private interests have become matters of public controversy. The government has developed a “multiple use” philosophy, which attempts to balance environmental, energy, and socioeconomic considerations in the development of its lands. Currently, environmental interests are attempting to stall any further leasing, while development interests, spurred on by the “sagebrush rebellion,” are demanding more private access to federal reserves. Regardless of the outcome of this debate, it is clear that whether and how these reserves are developed will have major effects on United States energy policy.

In shaping this policy, at least some public information exists on the location of the federally owned coal lands. However, in the East, and in parts of the West where federal ownership of energy reserves is not as extensive, little systematic data is available on the location of privately held energy resources, nor on the ownership of the lands above them. (In the Appalachian coalfields, in particular, there is extensive separation of mineral ownership from surface ownership.) A few studies of coal landownership have been done in the Appalachian area, but these are scattered and incomplete. In other parts of the country, even less information could be found.

One study, done outside of the Appalachian coalfields in southern Illinois,²⁷ examined 380,000 acres of corporately owned coal land in thirty-five Illinois counties. Of this land, 83 percent was owned by only six corporations. Over 99 percent of the total was owned by large absentee corporations. Small, independent company landholdings were found in only six counties and accounted for only 0.7 percent of the acreage studied. In general, the landownership reflected a national trend toward the takeover of energy reserves by integrated ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction by Charles C. Geisler
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Landownership—A National Issue, an Appalachian Issue
• 2. Who Owns the Land and Minerals?
• 3. Who Bears the Tax Burden?
• 4. Economic Development for Whom?
• 5. Appalachia’s Disappearing Farmland
• 6. Homeless in the Mountains
• 7. Ownership, Energy, and the Land
• 8. A Call to Action
• Appendix 1. Fifty Top Owners and Other Data
• Appendix 2. Methodology of the Land Study
• Appendix 3. Annotated Bibliography
• Notes
• Index