More than 90,000 smallholdings were created, and since then the independent smallholders, who form the majority of the Agrarian Party (now the Centre Party), have been a major factor in Finnish politics.
Over the past two decades, colonisation of the cerrados (savannahs) of Mato Grosso has turned the state into the country's largest source of soya and cotton, and a big producer of rice, maize and sugar.Like Mr Sachetti, many of the colonists are the children of family farmers from smallholdings in southern Brazil.
And no one has a notion how to extricate Romania's 6m peasants from their smallholdings.
According to one guess, 1% of the population owns 77% of the farmland.To complicate matters further, in recent decades Brazilians have bought up many smallholdings and turned them into vast soya farms, which have become the mainstay of the economy and of government revenues.
An estimated 450m of these smallholdings exist worldwide, typically providing a subsistence-at-best income for more than 2 billion of the poorest people on the planet.
As well as jobs in things like roadbuilding, he suggests offering rural smallholdings to slumdwellers.
Farmers have begun to fence off the smallholdings the state has allocated them with barbed wire in the hope of selling them.
Until the 1980s farms as large as Mr Ouyang's were unknown: 95% of Chinese pigs came from smallholdings with fewer than five animals.
A 2009 study of pork sold in Nagaland, in the north-east of India, where smallholdings have been flourishing (Christians, fond of pork, are prevalent there), found that 9% of meat contained tapeworm cysts.
In Zambia, that American firm is investing $42m in 48 big farms and 1,200 smallholdings, creating it says 24,000 jobs.
According to the Global Footprint Network, a San Francisco think-tank which seeks to quantify demand and supply of natural resources, the "biocapacity" of Africa per person has fallen by half since 1960 (see chart).As smallholdings, or shambas, are subdivided, children who have inherited nothing move to new areas.
