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A form of land tenure in which the landowners\' returns take the form of a share of the farmers\' produce rather than a cash or farm rent, also known by the French term métayage (Wells, 1984). Sharecropping arrangements involve short-term contracts for the annual cycle of production of a specific crop in which crop raising is contracted out to labouring households, individuals or work gangs who thereby take on the large part of the economic risks of production. These arrangements have been widely assumed to belong to the agricultural past and interpreted as feudal or pre-capitalist in nature (e.g. Marx, 1964), but they remain significant in contemporary agriculture, even in the West. Sharecropping takes many forms in different contexts, but all tend to be associated with highly concentrated patterns of landownership and exploitative labour relations; for example, in the cotton South of the USA between white landowners and black farmers (Mann, 1984), or, between landowners and Mexican migrant workers in California\'s strawberry industry (Wells, 1996). (SW)
References Mann, S. 1984: Sharecropping in the cotton South: a case of uneven development in agriculture. Rural Sociology 49: 412-29. Marx, K. 1964: Pre-capitalist economic formations. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Wells, M. 1984: The resurgence of sharecropping: historical anomaly or political strategy? American Journal of Sociology 90/1: 1-29. Wells, M. 1996: Strawberry fields: politics, class and work in California agriculture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. |
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