MEZZADRIA. — It is a contractual arrangement in agriculture of a characteristically associative nature, in which the landowner and the sharecropper associate themselves for the cultivation of a farm and for the conduct of related activities with the aim of dividing the profits equally.
The landowner contributes a rural estate, known as a podere; this constitutes a unit of land equipped with farm buildings for the housing of the sharecropper’s family and for the shelter of livestock, as well as for the storage of machinery and harvest. The podere must be planted with trees and vines, provided with roads and water. The size of the podere must be proportionate to the labor capacity of the colonica family, so as to ensure its sustenance and a certain continuity of work through a complete rotation of crops within the agricultural year.
The sharecropper, as head of the colonica family, commits himself to providing the necessary labor for the cultivation of the podere, in which he resides permanently, with the assistance of his family members. In this respect, mezzadria differs essentially from colonia parziaria, which has its economic center in non-farmed areas.
The livestock and farm equipment are contributed entirely by the landowner or half by each party, depending on local customs and provincial statutes. This latter form is becoming more widespread with the gradual improvement of the economic conditions of the sharecropping class, also because it is considered, from a social standpoint, the most suitable means of strengthening those bonds of solidarity and collaboration between capital and labor that constitute the very raison d’être of the mezzadria institution.
The mezzadria contract boasts a centuries-old tradition. Although similar relationships are mentioned in Mosaic, Babylonian, and Roman law, it took on its characteristic modern form during the period of the medieval communes and guilds (13th–14th centuries), when the rural populace, freed from the bonds of feudal servitude, developed a new sense of economic and civil freedom. The simplicity of the mezzadria relationship, in its fundamental outlines, has allowed it to remain widely practiced in farmed areas (especially in Emilia, the Marches, Abruzzo, Tuscany, and Lazio), with ease of adaptation to the needs of different agricultural zones, while maintaining its own economic, social, and legal unity, as enshrined in the Labor Code of the new Civil Code (arts. 2141–63).
The social aspect of the mezzadria question is particularly evident at the moment of the division of products, the management of the enterprise, and the duration of the contract.
In deference to the principles of the new Italian Constitution, principles repeatedly affirmed in papal encyclicals, it is necessary to ensure that the sharecropper receives remuneration for his labor in such a measure as to guarantee him and his family a free and dignified existence. For this reason, the division of products in mezzadria should be carried out in varying proportions according to the productivity of the podere, and in any case in such a way as to secure for the worker an income that meets the aforementioned conditions. The technical and administrative management of the enterprise, according to the principles of the current Civil Code, falls to the landowner. He exercises it directly or through a farm manager or a trusted technician, in collaboration with the sharecropper, who, even in his capacity as a small agricultural entrepreneur, thus takes an active part in the management of the enterprise in which he has an interest, possibly through the councils of farm managers in those agricultural areas where a significant number of poderi are administered collectively, as occurs in Tuscan farmsteads. Finally, the concern to guarantee a certain stability to the sharecropper, who finds both home and work on the podere—thus freeing him from a condition of inferiority vis-à-vis the landowner that arises from his constant exposure to uncertainty about the future—appears to be guiding new legislation toward a transcendence of the liberal conception of the system of examples. The termination of the contract, following the example of the English law on smallholdings (Agricultural Holdings Act, 1925) and the French law of April 13, 1946 (on tenancy and sharecropping), seems thus to be 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, mezzadria is destined to play a leading role in the moral and material elevation of agricultural workers and in the social pacification of the countryside. Through it, tenant farmers are directly integrated into the cycle of production, with all the rights and obligations that flow therefrom; they share in the fortunes of the enterprise in which they work and, through a gradual selection of the best elements, have the opportunity to attain ownership of the land. It is with this end in view that the right of pre-emption is intended to operate, granting the sharecropper the faculty to be preferred over third parties in the event of the sale of the podere on which he lives and works.