Agricultural Cooperatives In Transition
Csaba Csaki, Yoav Kislev
- 428 pagine
- English
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Agricultural Cooperatives In Transition
Csaba Csaki, Yoav Kislev
Informazioni sul libro
Originally published in 1993, this is a study of agricultural co-operatives. The farming structure in transition countries has shifted from dominance of large corporate farms to family smallholdings. Smallholders everywhere experience difficulties with access to market services, including sale of products, purchase of inputs, and acquisition of machinery; they suffer from credit shortages and have limited access to information and advisory services. The barriers to market access prevent smallholders from fully exploiting their inherent productivity advantages. Best-practice world experience highlights farmers' service cooperatives, created by grassroots users, as the most effective way of improving the market access of small farmers. Service cooperatives also help smallholders overcome market failures, when private business entrepreneurs are unwilling to provide services in areas that they judge unprofitable or unfairly exploit users through monopolistic practices. These difficulties and market failures are prominent in transition countries and scholars accordingly expected rapid development of agricultural service cooperatives in response to smallholder needs. The present volume explores gaps between expectations and reality.
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Informazioni
PART ONE Transformation of Socialist Agriculture
1 Land Reform and the Future Role of Cooperatives in Agriculture in the Former Socialist Countries in Europe
Common Heritage of Socialist Agriculture
State Farms | Collective Farms | |||
Number of farms | Average area (hectares) | Number of farms | Average area (hectares) | |
Albania | 70 | 2,400 | 420 | 1,270 |
Bulgaria* | 536 | 9,692 | NA | NA |
Czechoslovakia | 226 | 6,204 | 1,677 | 2,605 |
GDR | 465 | 945 | 3,904 | 1,370 |
Hungary | 128 | 7,598 | 1,270 | 4,195 |
Poland | 1,258 | 2,665 | 2,342 | 297 |
Romania | 419 | 4,895 | 4,363 | 2,093 |
USSR | 22,690 | 16,051 | 26,660 | 6,370 |
Need for Reform
- large, inefficient farms with high production costs, suffering from lack of individual initiative and "free-rider" attitudes;
- elimination of incentives for efficiency improvement due to institution of cost-based procurement prices and deeply subsidized unrestricted credits;
- food price subsidies, producing an excess demand for food at the subsidized prices and a high level of food consumption relative to countries of comparable wealth in market economies;
- pervasive monopoly of the state in food processing and distribution and in farm input supply, leading to destruction of economic intermediation mechanisms and total dependence of producers on centrally allocated inputs;
- macroeconomic distortions, including a chronic budget deficit, inflation, and mounting foreign debt.
Land Ownership Reforms
- the establishment of a legal framework for private land ownership and land markets;
- the decision on actual eligibility and allocation of land to new owners;
- the creation of a new farming structure including the restructuring of existing large-scale farms in line with the new ownership patterns and the principles of a market-based economy.
- retain the state ownership of land and allow individual use of land through leasing;
- make the land the property of those who wish to pursue agricultural production, while limiting the right to sell and lease out the land during a certain transition period;
- allow private ownership of land by farmers without any restrictions on immediate sale or leasing;
- grant land ownership based on pre-collectivization property rights to those who want to farm and compensate financially the previous owners who are not active farmers;
- restore pre-collectivization land ownership relations without any restrictions;
- treat land ownership as an integrated element of an overall compensation and privatization package.