SHARECROPPING. - It is an agrarian contract of a typically associative nature, in which the grantor and the sharecropper associate for the cultivation of a farm and for the carrying on of activities connected with it, for the purpose of dividing the profits equally.
The grantor contributes a rural estate, which is called a podere; it constitutes a unit of land equipped with rural buildings for the housing of the sharecropping family and for the shelter of livestock, and for the storage of machinery and of the harvest. The podere must be planted with trees and vines, and provided with roads and water. The size of the podere must be proportionate to the working capacity of the tenant family, so as to ensure its subsistence and a certain continuity of work through a complete rotation of crops within the agricultural year.
The sharecropper, as head of the tenant family, undertakes to provide the labor necessary for the cultivation of the podere, on which he resides permanently, with the assistance of his own family members; and in this the mezzadria differs essentially from colonia parziaria, which has its economic center in areas not organized into poderi.
The live and dead stock is contributed entirely by the grantor, or half by each party, according to local customs and provincial agreements. This second form is today spreading with the gradual progress of the economic conditions of the sharecropping class, also because it is held, from the social point of view, to be the most suitable for strengthening those bonds of solidarity and collaboration between capital and labor that constitute the raison d'être of the sharecropping institution.
The contract of mezzadria boasts a tradition of several centuries. Although relations of a similar kind are already spoken of in Mosaic, Babylonian and Roman law, it came to establish itself with its characteristic modern physiognomy in the era of the medieval communes and guilds (13th-14th centuries), when the rural common people, having broken the bonds of feudal serfdom, acquired a new awareness of economic and civil liberty. The simplicity of the scheme of the sharecropping relationship, in its fundamental lines, allows it still today to enjoy great diffusion in areas organized into poderi (especially in Emilia, the Marche, Abruzzo, Tuscany and Lazio), with ease of adaptation to the needs of the different agrarian zones, while still maintaining its own economic, social and juridical unity, enshrined in the book on labor of the new Civil Code (arts. 2141-63).
The social aspect of the problem of the mezzadria manifests itself particularly at the moment of the division of the products, of the management of the undertaking and of the duration of the contract.
In deference to the principles of the new Italian Constitution, principles repeatedly affirmed also in pontifical encyclicals, the sharecropper must be assured a remuneration for his labor of such a measure as to guarantee to him and to his family a free and dignified existence. For this reason the division of the products in the mezzadria should be carried out in different proportions according to the productivity of the poderi, and in any case always in such a way as to assure the worker an income that corresponds to the conditions set out above. The technical and administrative management of the undertaking, according to the principles of the Civil Code in force, belongs to the grantor. He exercises it directly, or through the estate steward or a technician of his confidence, in collaboration with the sharecropper, who, also in his capacity as a small agricultural entrepreneur, thus comes to participate actively in the management of the undertaking, in which he has a shared interest, possibly through the estate councils for those agricultural zones where a considerable number of poderi is united under a single administration, as happens on Tuscan estates. Finally, the concern to guarantee a certain stability to the sharecropper, who on the podere finds at once a home and work, so as to remove him from a condition of inferiority toward the grantor that derives from his being continually exposed to fear of the morrow, seems to orient the new legislation toward an overcoming of the liberal conception of the system of escomi (evictions). Notice of termination, following the example of the English law on small tenancies (Agricultural holdings act, 1925) and of the French law of 13 April 1946 (Du fermage et du métayage), thus appears to be made subject to the existence of objectively just causes, according to the so-called principle of "just cause."
In a social order inspired by the principles of Christian morality, the mezzadria is destined to fulfill a leading role for the moral and material elevation of the workers of the land and for the social pacification of the countryside. Through it the tenant farmers are directly brought into the cycle of production, with all the rights and obligations that derive therefrom; they share the fortunes of the undertaking in which they work and, through a gradual selection of the best elements, have the possibility of attaining ownership of the land. In this sense and to this end, that right of pre-emption is destined to operate which recognizes in the sharecropper the faculty of being preferred to third parties in the event of the sale of the land on which he lives and works.
Bibliography5 works
Bruno Rossi