DEVELOPMENT & TRANSITION Land Reform, Transition, and Rural Development David Sedik and Zvi Lerman The rural sector in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has undergone a shift from predominantly collective to more individualized agriculture. During the 1990-2000 period considerably more land transferred ownership in these countries than in other successful land reforms, including those in Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (Table 1).
In actual practice, it was not always possible to return the exact plot of land to an individual or to his/her descendents. Often other plots were offered to former landowners in compensation, inter alia to avoid the fragmentation of large, integrated farm complexes into uneconomical smallholdings. For this reason, restitution in CEE did not necessarily lead to land fragmentation; it may have facilitated the transition from socialist cooperatives to corporate farms (Mathijs and Swinnen, 1998). In countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Slovak and Czech Republics, and Romania and Bulgaria, many large farms were downsized, but maintained as corporations. There were exceptions to this general scheme. As in the CIS countries, Albania underwent privatization of stateowned land followed by the egalitarian distribution of
Table 1. Land reforms Period
Duration (years)
Land transferred (million ha)
Mexico
1917-92
75
100
Brazil
1964-94
30
11
Japan
1945-52
7
2
Korea
1945-50
5
0,5
Taiwan (Rep. of China)
1949-53
4
0,2
CEE countries*
1990-2000
10
33
CIS countries**
1990-2000
10
116
Country or region
* The countries of Central and Eastern Europe that are now part of the European Union, as well as Albania. Does not include the Western Balkan countries of former Yugoslavia. ** The countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Source: Deininger, 2003.
The basis of this shift from collective to individual agriculture lay in two interrelated aspects of agricultural policy reform: land reform, which concerns land use rights and land ownership; and farm reform, which deals with restructuring farms into individual land holdings.
Land Reform in Eastern Europe and the CIS Although nearly all CEE and CIS countries decided to privatize land, strategies for land privatization differed between these two groups (Table 2). In the CEE countries where legal records of current or previous owners still existed, restitution of actual plots of land was the primary privatization strategy. In these countries most agricultural land formally remained under private ownership throughout the socialist period. People joined cooperative farms during collectivization, but their land was not appropriated by the state or ceded to the cooperative. People lost the right to utilize their land, but they did not lose title to the land. Over the years, as rural residents moved to the city or died, some land became the property of the cooperative.1
2
land in former cooperatives to rural residents. State farms in Albania were eventually auctioned off to large investors. Poland is also a separate case, since collectivized agriculture was essentially abandoned after the 1956 uprising. The land that had been devoted to state farms was eventually auctioned off. The pattern in the Yugoslav successor states was much like Poland: most of the land had remained in individual family farms during the socialist period. In the CIS, where the longer history of collectivized agriculture made restitution virtually impossible, land privatization in the early 1990s had a quite different meaning. Since agricultural land had belonged to the Soviet state, the first step was to legalize private ownership of agricultural land. Collective farms were then transformed into corporate farms (joint stock companies, partnerships, etc.) and land shares within these farms were distributed to workers. Thus, collectives became corporate farms that operated on collectively owned and farmed land.