Darea în parte a terenurilor în România: exploatare sau efectul piețelor nefuncționale? Land leasing in Romania: exploitation or the effect of dysfunctional markets? Section Studies and Research Papers

Abstract

The article aimed at investigating the extension of sharecropping within the Romanian agrarian landscape today and to make the phenomenon intelligible with reference to the theories designed for this topic. Sharecropping does not have a consensual theoretical framing in peasant studies. Marxist peasant studies see sharecropping as a way of extracting surplus by landowners from dependent peasants, usually in phases of transition from social arrangements based on class exploitation to capitalism. Classical economics, while questioning the economic feasibility of sharecropping relationships, consider the phenomenon as a reaction to non-functioning markets. Romanian survey data show that sharecropping is rather unusual but constitutes the bulk of land transfer arrangements. The vast majority of land leasing cases or farmers associations can be considered actually variants of sharecropping. Moreover, the data support the idea that sharecropping is mutual help, cooperative, at the rural level. Empirical evidence does not support the hypothesis that sharecropping is exploitive though the data related to this subject are inconclusive.