Short answer. Special agrarian laws come first. Article 1684 does not hand share-tenancy over to the ordinary Civil Code lease rules; it lists a layered set of sources — special laws, then the parties' own stipulations, then the rules on partnership, then local custom — with the special laws leading.
What the law says
Land tenancy on shares shall be governed by special laws, the stipulations of the parties, the provisions on partnership and by the customs of the place.
Civil Code, Article 1684 — Land Tenancy on Shares. Read the full provision →
Four sources, in a deliberate order
The article says land tenancy on shares shall be governed by special laws, the stipulations of the parties, the provisions on partnership and by the customs of the place. The sequence is not accidental. A kasama arrangement, where the tiller and the landowner divide the harvest rather than pay a fixed rent, is not treated as a plain lease. Instead the Civil Code steps back and points first to the special agrarian statutes, and only then to what the parties agreed, to partnership principles, and to the practices of the locality. Each source fills the gaps the one before it leaves.
Why the special laws lead
Placing special laws at the head of the list matters because those laws carry public policy the parties cannot simply contract around. Agrarian legislation is built on security of tenure and on protecting the tiller's stake in the land and its produce. Where such a law speaks, a private stipulation that contradicts it does not win merely because both sides signed it. So a landowner who drafts a share agreement on the assumption that the written terms govern everything is reading the order backwards: the statute frames what the stipulation is even allowed to say.
The partnership analogy
The reference to the provisions on partnership reflects how a share arrangement actually works. One side supplies the land, the other the labour, and both take an agreed portion of what the effort yields — much like partners dividing profits. So when the special law and the parties' terms run out, the Civil Code borrows partnership reasoning to answer questions such as how gains and losses are shared. Local custom then sits last, supplying the settled practices of the place for matters none of the earlier sources has addressed, such as how a particular crop is traditionally split.
What the article does not decide
Article 1684 tells you which body of rules applies; it does not tell you how a specific dispute comes out, and it does not fix the shares — that is left to the special law, the agreement and custom. It also does not settle the threshold question of whether a given setup is genuinely a share-tenancy at all, which turns on the facts: personal cultivation, consent, and an actual sharing of the harvest. And it does not convert every farm arrangement into tenancy; a straightforward fixed-rent lease of rural land is a different creature governed by the ordinary lease provisions.
Related provisions
- Civil Code, Article 1684 — Land Tenancy on Shares
- Civil Code, Article 1673 — Grounds for Judicial Ejectment