National Agrarian Society (SNA)

The National Agrarian Society (Sociedad Nacional Agraria, or SNA) was founded in 1876 by a group of coastal planters as a lobbying body called the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura. Members sought to foster export agricultural interests in the government. The organization collapsed when the War of the Pacific began (1879), but it was revived and renamed by the same planters in the late 1890s. Its reorganization was spearheaded by many of the export planters whose power in government, lending, and commercial circles had been established. The revived lobbying group broadened to include major Andean landowners with outlooks similar to those of coastal planters. Prominent officers included sugar planter Isaac Alzamora, Antero Aspíllaga, and the heads of the wealthy and powerful Boza and Larco families, joined later by sugar planter and publisher Pedro Beltrán and wealthy landowner and cotton planter Miguel Checa. By the mid-1930s the SNA sought legislation to regulate sharecropping and farm labor, to extend its members' control of these important sources of labor. In 1947 the National Assembly passed the Ley de Yanaconaje (Sharecropping Law) that protected sharecroppers by insisting on written contracts and limits on rent. Landowners accepted the legislation as inevitable, but thereafter many switched to wage labor and restricted the number of sharecroppers permitted on their lands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Magnus Mörner, The Andean Past: Land, Societies, and Conflicts (1985), esp. pp. 188-262.

Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840–1880 (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Contreras, Carlos. El aprendizaje del capitalismo: Estudios de historia económica y social del Perú republicano. Lima, Perú: IEP, Instituto del Estudios Peruanos, 2004.

                                     Vincent Peloso