Abstract
The modernization of private agriculture in a socialized economy : the Polish policy turn After forty years of consolidation and functioning of a soviet-type economy in Poland, individual farming remains its key source of agricultural and food products. However, a lasting discriminatory policy towards it, and multiform attempts of socializing it, have delayed and hindered its modernization and seemed so far to show its structural incompatibility with this system, then the necessary liquidation, or substantial reduction, of this phenomenon, atypical in the east european economies. Moreover the west european scenario of agricultural modernization, where the money-market self- regulation has played the crucial role (even though it was complicated by the interference of a considerable state-corporate apparatus), has proved, for this reason, to be inassimilable by Poland. Yet the recent developments suggest another view of this long and difficult coexistence, namely a slow learning process by trial and error, of a specific and historically unprecedented way of selective modernization of individual farms, and of their integration into the global economy and society, quite consistent with the « distributive » logic of the latters. The new Polish farm policy in the 80s, that the national economic depression seems to have freed from the previous inhibiting commitment to the « necessary » agricultural socialization, and its first productive and economic results, tend to confirm the reality and pertinence of a turning point in this direction. But simultaneously they show the need for its strenthening, towards a true structural mutation of the modernized farms, especially their specialisation, and the difficulty of such a mutation in the present state of their relations with the agricultural administration.
Published Version
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