Agricultural law

Agricultural law comes from the Latin "directum" and is composed of the postulates of justice that form part of the normative and institutional order within a society. It is a set of norms that allow people to solve any kind of social conflict. The term agricultural refers properly to agriculture, which consists of those works that have relation with soil, product plantation and environmental transformation in order to satisfy human needs. This being so, we can say that agricultural law is related to and based on laws, regulations and provisions with respect to rural property and rural exploitations. It takes into account producers, peasants and is conditioned by nature and values. It is a type of pluralist and non-class rights seeking to improve the economic sovereignty of a country region, protecting first of all, ecology and renewable natural resources.

Related topics

constitutional right, Natural law, positive law, public law

What is agricultural law?

Agricultural law is in itself a set of norms, laws, rules and provisions that are responsible for controlling and regulating the properties and the way in which a territory is organized, as well as the farming operations that may occur within a society.

Agricultural law characteristics

• Agricultural law is a real and objective right. It is realistic because it is in charge of studying man and society within reality and looks for ways to solve all the problems that can occur during agricultural activity. It is also objective because the situations it deals with exist, and it seeks to solve them based on objective facts.
• This type of right is democratic since all its rules have as their main objective that the land should be only for working hands that work on it.
• It is of an economic and social nature, because its rules, laws and regulations are geared towards resolving a series of conflicts that may arise as a result of land tenure and land exploitation.
• The owner of the agricultural law is the farmer worker.
• It is part of social law, since it includes the resolution of problems within society through its norms and principles.

History

The agricultural and livestock activities that man carries out to conserve life and for economic exploitation are necessary for his subsistence, and this process has been carried out since humanity’s origins. The homo sapiens, needed to produce food to be able to maintain itself and to survive, for this reason, they carried out agricultural activities from its beginnings. These activities have had regulations since their early days when they began to develop rules for proper human existence and for guiding man.

Agricultural law principles

The principles of agricultural law are the normative statements that form part of it, without prejudice to not being integrated into a legal system. The following are the principles of this type of law:

• Dispositive or Professional Principle: Refers to the need for the activities of the parties to ensure a judicial process and the official action of a judge to follow up the process. It is under this principle that a lawsuit is filed, including a response and counterclaim.
• Orality Principle: This principle is the one that has as its main objective that all the acts that take place during the process are carried out by voice with the exception of those that must be formulated in a written document. It also has several principles within it such as immediacy, the judge’s physical identity, concentration, publicity and free evaluation of evidence.
• Inquisitive Principle and Extensive Judge Powers: The judge has the obligation to give impetus to the proceedings, to direct them and to be able to question the parties with complete freedom to evaluate the evidence presented.
• Principle of Loyalty and Procedural Probability: Both aspects are fundamental principles on which every procedural system should be governed. They must be respected by the parties, the lawyers and the judge. The main objective of this principle is to maintain the integrity, honesty and morals of the judge in his decisions and the way the parties involved act.
• Principle of Gratuity: Seeks to favor economically weak parties.
• Judge’s Roaming Principle: Judges may leave their juries to seek justice in the field.
• Non-renewability of Competition Principle: Seeks to achieve a closeness between the judge and the place of the facts.
• Principle of Jurisdiction Perpetuity: Establishes that after defining the way to obtain knowledge of an agricultural conflict, the judge must process the process until the death of the court.

Agricultural law classification

Agricultural law is classified into substantive agricultural law and procedural agricultural law. Substantive law is established in a set of rules that establish the rights and obligations, the powers and duties of individuals and the sanctions that must be applied when laws are breached. Procedural law arises when agricultural rights are violated, and the jurisdictional authority can be activated to properly administer agricultural justice.

Examples of agricultural law

Agricultural law in Venezuela, for example, has been declining little by little since oil was discovered. At colonial times, Venezuela depended heavily on the countryside for crops and corn, and the land practically belonged to its owners, but when oil began to emerge, agriculture took a back seat. In Mexico, agricultural law took on an autonomous configuration based on constitutional guarantees. Thanks to this type of law, agricultural reform was born that modifies and adapts the principles and general regulations since the beginning of the law.