Legal Aspects of Renting, Sharecropping, and Other Indirect Land Tenure Forms in Costa Rica

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Abstract
This J.S.M. thesis examines whether Costa Rican legal rules in the 1970s regulating renters, sharecroppers, and others who farmed land that they did not own were functional or not in promoting development. It considered the history of agricultural activity and pattern of land ownership from the colonial period up to the early 1970s. As agriculture could no longer absorb natural population growth in the early twentieth century, land ownership became concentrated together with substantial subsistence agriculture. In the 1940s, a radical change in political philosophy rejected laissez faire economic organization and promoted a dynamic role for the state in the allocation of economic inducements, aimed toward diversifying the coffee production economy. The 1949 Constitution, a 1961 agrarian reform statute, and central planning office statements, provided three general societal goals: (1) maximum agricultural productivity; (2) equitable distribution of returns; and (3) utilization of the social and political status gained from tenure arrangements to further stable, democratic government. A research project measured quantitatively whether the government’s policies promoted several connecting factors that could meet its societal goals: (1) access to more than subsistence farming and easy transfer of the right to work the land; (2) management training; and (3) security of tenure. The investigation into legal culture and the use or nonuse of legal institutions revealed whether legal rules were effective, including for dispute settlement. Costa Rica’s civil code rules reflected the nineteenth century liberal property rights regime, which the judiciary did not interpret to bring into harmony with the realities of the 1970s. Alternatively, customary tenure forms met the farmers situation in the six geographical zones studied, although their experience with the formal legal system, including lawyers, notaries, and administrative agencies, precluded them from bringing their disputes to it. The conclusion was that farmers’ activities channeled better toward national development by private action than via the network of Costa Rican legal rules and institutions. Quantitative data described differences in the six zones studied.

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