SHARECROPPER. - This is a subspecies of the broader scheme of the leasing of agricultural lands, in which the lessee, as a small agricultural entrepreneur, directly undertakes the cultivation of the land with work predominantly his own or that of members of his family.
The landowner, in this form of management, remains extraneous to the entire productive cycle, the management of which passes to the lessee, limiting himself to collecting an annual rent, in money and in kind. For his part, the lessee, in taking on the management of the land, undertakes to cultivate it according to the rules of good agricultural technique.
The live and dead stock necessary for the management generally belongs to the lessee. If, on the other hand, it is the property, in whole or in part, of the owner of the land, the tenant assumes the risks at the time of delivery and undertakes to return it at the expiry of the contract in the same kind, quality, number and weight, upon payment of a non-interest-bearing deposit.
The forms of f. a. c. d., more or less evolved, more or less favourable to the worker, enshrined in law, in provincial regulations or in customs, constitute an infinite range, which varies in relation to the diversity of agricultural zones, the economic and financial possibilities of the rural classes, the fertility of the soil, the land tenure system and local traditions.
The small f. a. c. d., in its most evolved form, called autonomous or family-based, which presupposes the farmstead holding, has been spreading especially in the Veneto and in Campania, as well as in other hilly zones where the fragmentation of property and the poverty of the soil have determined the spread of this type of agricultural contract in place of the centuries-old institution of sharecropping. In the zone, on the other hand, where the particular land arrangement does not lend itself to farmstead settlement, the lease contract loses its characteristic family-based physiognomy, assuming the form of a small non-autonomous and particular lease.
From the leases of industrialized farming and cultivation holdings in Lombardy, to the mixed relations of lease and sharecropping of certain Venetian and Piedmontese provinces, to the quasi-sharecropping of the Trentino (woodland and arable land under sharecropping, livestock and pasture under lease), there is a whole interweaving of relations between landowner and worker, not always easily classifiable.
In any case, one may note in every zone a clear tendency toward a gradual evolution towards the most perfect form of autonomous lease, in relation to the improved financial conditions of the rural categories, to the need for clarity and precision of agreements, to the changed technical and economic requirements of agriculture and of the market, which cannot fail, sooner or later, to make their influence felt on the definitive arrangement of legal relations in agriculture.
The social problem with regard to the f. a. c. d. is above all a problem of better protection of agricultural labour in an intermediate form of management that must constitute a stage in the worker's ascent towards the acquisition of ownership of the land. The need for adequate measures in this matter is felt especially in relation to the requirement of a control over rents, particularly in zones with a denser agricultural population, where the supply of land is not proportionate to the demand.
The problem here is that of ensuring the small lessee a fair remuneration for his work in relation to his family's needs, because in the profit of the small enterprise, once the amount of the rent has been deducted, what remains represents the income from the manual labour contributed to it by the tenant family.
Appropriate fiscal and credit facilities must assist the lessee in acquiring ownership not only of the agricultural capital but also of the land, for which the projects for the reform of agricultural contracts provide a right of pre-emption in favour of the lessee, and, other conditions being equal, in the event of the sale of the land. Measures that are not foreign to other foreign legal systems.
The problem must therefore find its solution within the framework of a new political-social direction, inspired by Christian morality, in which the almost patriarchal conception of the rural family fully belongs, understood not only as a «community for the consumption of goods, but also and particularly as a community of production» (Pius XII, Address to farmers), where in unity of interests and intentions the purest and most sacred affections are cemented, in the shadow of the domestic hearth.
Economic and social reasons further advise ensuring the small lessee a certain stability on the land, in order to attach him more greatly to his work and to the land, through a multi-year duration of the contract. The legislation of many foreign countries, with agricultural conditions not very dissimilar from our own, has been moving in this direction. See, for example, the Dutch law of 12 Nov. 1941 and the Spanish law of 21 June 1940. A public-law control over annual leases is practised instead in England (Agricultural Holdings Act of 1925): this system favours the best and most capable workers, gradually eliminating the inept and the dishonest.
The zones where the need to adopt all these measures is most urgent and most keenly felt are naturally those of large landed estates in southern Italy, where the worker's position is rendered more uncertain and difficult by the existence of the great intermediary lessee and sublessor, where plots of land are divided into modest fragments, often insufficient to ensure the means of life and work for a family unit, where farmstead settlement is practically unknown and the Sicilian terracinato or Calabrian terracirista is forced into long and tiring journeys to go to work every day, for lack of rural buildings in the countryside and of all those public works (electrical and hydraulic installations, roads, bridges, etc.) that are indispensable to human existence.
Despite the manifest favour that, for the autonomy both technical and economic that it grants to the worker, the f. a. c. d. enjoys among social reformers, it is nevertheless evident that this form of management cannot be extended beyond certain limits, encountering obstacles that are almost insurmountable, there where the dimensions of the holding and the type of industrial-style cultivation require that employment of energies and technical and administrative competences and that influx of capital, which generally are lacking in our rural classes. These are those zones or those agricultural holdings where other forms of management of the agricultural enterprise, not least sharecropping and large-scale leasing, still have an important social function to perform, which is the reason for their very existence in the current legal and economic order.
Bibliography7 works
Bruno Rossi