The ordinance remained in effect until 1970, but was largely unutilized after 1960 as the Viet Cong insurgents took control or disputed government control of most of the rural areas of South Vietnam. Land-to-the-Tiller. In 1967, land reform expert Roy Prosterman revived the idea of land reform in South Vietnam. Drawing on experience in other countries, Prosterman proposed a "land-to-the-tiller" program to compete "with the Viet Cong for the allegiance of the peasants." The plan had two main features: (1) all agricultural land in South Vietnam was to be owned by the farmers actually tilling the land, including land previously distributed by the Viet Cong and (2) landlords would be compensated fully for the land taken from them with payment guaranteed by the United States. Prosterman estimated that the land-to-the-tiller program could be accomplished at a cost of $900 million—less than the Vietnam War was costing the United States each month. On 26 March 1970, with the Vietnam War still underway, the government of South Vietnam began implementation of the Land-to-the-Tiller program, similar to what Prosterman had proposed. The reform aimed to expropriate land from landlords not personally cultivating the land and giving it to tenant farmers; the landlords were compensated. Individual land holding was limited to 15 hectares. Legal title was extended to peasants who lived in areas under control of the South Vietnamese government to whom land had previously been given by the Viet Cong.  U.S.President Richard Nixon gave his support to new land reform measures in June 1969 in the Midway communiqué, judging it favorable to the vietnamization of the conflict. In total, the United States financed $339 million of the total $441 million the reform cost. "By all accounts, the program was highly successful," in the words of one scholar. By the end of 1973, 953,000 land titles had been distributed to poor or landless farmers and 1,198,000 hectares of land—nearly 40 percent of cultivated land in South Vietnam—had been distributed. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the U.S. estimated that land tenancy had practically disappeared in South Vietnam and that the living standard of farmers had increased by 30 to 50 percent. However, the Land-to-the-Tiller program "failed to have a decisive impact [on the Vietnam War] because it was too little, too late." The rectification campaign begun by the Viet Minh revolutionaries continued under the communist government of North Vietnam from 1954 to 1956.