Crop-Sharing Tenancy in Agriculture-A Rejoinder


Crop-Sharing Tenancy in Agriculture A Rejoinder Amiya Bagchi THIS is a belated response to the letter of P K Bardhan and T N Srinivasan ("Share Cropping", March 9, 1974, p 377).* Bardhan and Srinivasan (B-S for short) have attempted a rebuttal of some brief critical comments I had made, in passing,1 on their joint paper, "Crop-Sharing Tenancy in Agriculture; A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis'.2 I had made my comments brief (a) because I did not want to go into the irrelevant niceties of the neoclassical paradigm and (b) because I had thought that it would be abundantly clear that. the B-S paper also had implicit in it the basic assumption of neoclassical general equilibrium structures, viz, automatic full employment of labour. However, it would appear that even eminent practitioners of marginalist economics have to be reminded of certain elementary corollaries of the Thirtynine Articles they swear by, since they tend to be ensnared by the mathematical cobwebs they are so fond of weaving. Hence regretfully I must recapitulate certain properties of purely competitive models as part of my critique.