Share-Tenancy and Family Size in the Brazilian Northeast

In this paper it is proposed that high rural fertility in Latin America is a deliberate and rational adjustment to the conditions of agricultural production that prevail in many areas of the continent. The main finding is that share tenancy, the predominant form of organization of production in the sparsely populated central regions of the Northeast, and a common institution in much of Latin America, contains a set of powerful fertility inducements which are lost when households face a wage-labor situation in agriculture or in cities. Thus, the rapid decline of rural fertility in the past decade in Latin America may be due, in part, to the general demise of share tenancy and its replacement by sub-family farms (minifundios) dependent on wage labor. These broad implications are discussed in the final section of the paper.