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Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. Legal contract systems such as the Italian ''mezzadria'', the French ''métayage'', the Spanish ''mediero'', or the Islamic system of ''muqasat'', occur widely. ==Overview== Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the tenant. It encourages the cropper to remain on the land throughout the harvest season to work being large or small and prices being high or low. Because tenants benefit from larger harvests, they have an incentive to work harder and invest in better methods than in a slave plantation system. However, by dividing the working force into many individual workers, large farms no longer benefit from economies of scale. On the whole, sharecropping was not as economically efficient as the gang agriculture of slave plantations. In the U.S. "tenant" farmers own their own mules and equipment, and "sharecroppers" do not, and thus sharecroppers are poorer and of lower status. Sharecropping occurred extensively in, Scotland, Ireland and colonial Africa, and came into wide use in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The South had been devastated by war; planters had ample land but little money for wages or taxes. At the same time, most of the former slaves had labor but no money and no land; they rejected the kind of gang labor that typified slavery. A solution was the sharecropping system focused on cotton, which was the only crop that could generate cash for the croppers, landowners, merchants and the tax collector. Poor white farmers, who previously had done little cotton farming, needed cash as well and became sharecroppers.〔Eva O'Donovan, ''Becoming Free in the Cotton South'' (2007); Gavin Wright, ''Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War'' (1986); Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, ''One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation'' (2nd ed. 2008)〕 Jeffery Paige made a distinction between centralized sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralized sharecropping with other crops. The former is characterized by political conservatism and long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by wage slavery as markets penetrate. Decentralized sharecropping involves virtually no role for the landlord: plots are scattered, peasants manage their own labor and the landowners do not manufacture the crops. Leases are very short which leads to peasant radicalism. This form of tenure becomes more common when markets penetrate.〔Jeffery Paige, ''Agrarian Revolution'', page 373〕 Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England〔Griffiths, Liz ''(Farming to Halves: A New Perspective on an Absurd and Miserable System )'' in Rural History Today, Issue 6:2004 p.5, accessed at British Agricultural History Society, 16 February 2013.〕 (as the practice of "farming to halves"). It is still used in many rural poor areas today, notably in Pakistan and India. Although there is a perception that sharecropping was exploitative, “evidence from around the world suggests that sharecropping is often a way for differently endowed enterprises to pool resources to mutual benefit, overcoming credit restraints and helping to manage risk.”〔 〕 It can have more than a passing similarity to serfdom or indenture, particularly where associated with large debts at a plantation store that effectively tie down the workers and their family to the land. It has therefore been seen as an issue of land reform in contexts such as the Mexican Revolution. However, Nyambara states that Eurocentric historiographical devices such as 'feudalism' or 'slavery' often qualified by weak prefixes like 'semi-' or 'quasi-' are not helpful in understanding the antecedents and functions of sharecropping in Africa.〔 Sharecropping agreements can however be made fairly, as a form of tenant farming or sharefarming that has a variable rental payment, paid in arrears. There are three different types of contracts.〔Arthur F. Raper and Ira De A. Reid, ''Sharecroppers All'' (1941); Gavin Wright, ''Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War'' (1986).〕 #Workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum and keep the whole crop. #Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep some of the crop. #No money changes hands but the worker and land owner each keep a share of the crop. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sharecropping」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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