This article explores the agricultural land property rights transmission by family inheritance in Venezuela. Despite his quantitative importance (inheritance transmits each year twice the land area distributed by agrarian reform between 1958 and 1999), until recently there were few studies about this subject. The article focuses on field work done with the same general frame, and based on the family typology of Todd (2001). It finds a regional variety of forms of transmission by inheritance, generally with egalitarian division, with particularities regarding the property of the paternal house. This is often assigned to only one son, which is a communitarian family pattern prevails, with three or more generations clustered in the same house under patriarchal authority. However, there are regional situations with a high number of nuclear families, particularly in Agrarian Institute (INTI) lands. Inheritance is mainly informal, in the frame of family or community rules. This may be a problem for land rights security, especially if the price rises owing to external factors. This should be an incentive to develop a formal low cost registration systems, which combines the fluidity of community and family relations with the security of formal juridical norms.
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