Agricultural Restitution and Co-operative Transformation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia

Abstract

THE STARTING POINT FOR AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION in Central and Eastern Europe was moulded by two features of socialist agriculture. First, socialist agriculture was everywhere a combination of large-scale socialist (state or collective) and small-scale private (mainly part-time and self-supply-oriented) farming, whose proportions were not everywhere the same. Second, the main reason why these combinations of large-scale and small-scale farming differed was that socialism developed different models of 'collective farming', with different pricing and taxation mechanisms, and differing understandings of the role of private production. With the collapse of socialism, regimes were faced with the common task of providing compensation for historical injustices and restructuring large-scale farms, privatising them in the case of state farms, returning them to real owners in the case of co-operative (collective) farms. But, although the underlying problem was the same, countries addressed it differently because their 'collective farming' experiences had been different, and these differences had impacts on the pattern of post-socialist development generally, and on receptiveness to change and on the principles adopted in the legislation for restitution and restructuring of large-scale agriculture in particular. This article compares the Czech, Slovak and Hungarian experiences both at the national and local levels, the latter being based on extensive research carried out in the villages of the region.1