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Collective farming
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Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise.[1] There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective; and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries (including the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China and Vietnam) there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy (cooperative-run farms) and sovkhozy (state-run farms).
Pre-20th century history
[edit]Mexico
[edit]Under the Aztec Empire, central Mexico was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it each day. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.
Following the Mexican Revolution, a new constitution in 1917 abolished any remnant of feudal-like rights hacienda owners had over common lands and offered the development of ejidos: communal farms formed on land purchased from the large estates by the Mexican government.
Iroquois and Huron of North America
[edit]
The Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals. The Huron had "as much land as they need[ed]."[2] As a result, the Huron could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally. Any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. They maintained possession of the land as long as they continued to actively cultivate and tend the fields. Once they abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves.[3] While the Huron did seem to have lands designated for the individual, the significance of this possession may be of little relevance; the placement of corn storage vessels in the longhouses, which contained multiple families in one kinship group, suggests the occupants of a given longhouse held all production in common.[4]
The Iroquois had a similar communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered.[5] Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan.[6] Land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men's.[5] The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.[6]
Russian Empire
[edit]The obshchina (Russian: общи́на, IPA: [ɐpˈɕːinə], literally: "commune") or mir (Russian: мир, literally: "society" (one of the meanings)) or Selskoye obshestvo (Russian: сельское общество ("Rural community", official term in the 19th and 20th century) were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy (common).
The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided into sections based on soil quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social (providing to each according to their needs) as it was practical (ensuring that each person pay their taxes). Strips were periodically reallocated on the basis of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This reallocation was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the households' ability to pay their taxes.
Collectivization under state socialism
[edit]The Soviet Union introduced collective farming in its constituent republics between 1927 and 1933. The Baltic states and most of the Eastern Bloc (except Poland) adopted collective farming after World War II, with the accession of communist regimes to power. In Asia (People's Republic of China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam) the adoption of collective farming was also driven by communist government policies.
Soviet Union
[edit]
Leon Trotsky and the opposition bloc had originally advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis.[7] According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Joseph Stalin appropriated the position of the left opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.[8] Other scholars have argued the economic programme of Trotsky of voluntary collectivisation differed from the policy of forced collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928, due to the levels of brutality associated with the latter’s enforcement.[9][10][11]
As part of the first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (kolkhozy). At the same time, Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks (farmland owners). In what became known as dekulakization, defiant kulaks were executed or mass deported to Siberia by the Soviet Communist Party in order to implement the plan.
The centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in Ukraine. In 1932–1933, an estimated 11 million people, 3–7 million in Ukraine alone, died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives. It was not until 1940 that agricultural production finally surpassed its pre-collectivization levels.[12][13]
Collectivization throughout the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was not aggressively pursued until the early 1960s because of the Soviet leadership's focus on a policy of Russification of Moldavians into the Russian way of life[citation needed]. Much of the collectivization in Moldova had undergone in Transnistria, in Chişinău, the present-day capital city of Moldova. Most of the directors who regulated and conducted the process of collectivization were placed by officials from Moscow.[citation needed]
The efficiency of collective farms in the USSR is debatable. A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by privately farmed plots despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.[14] In 1935, the establishment of Personal Subsidiary Farms on collective land was allowed in the range of .25-1 hectare.[15] Private cattle ownership existed after 1935 but was severely restricted by decree in 1956.
Romania
[edit]
In Romania, land collectivization began in 1948 and continued for over more than a decade until its virtual eradication in 1962.[16] Force sometimes had to be used to enforce collective agricultural practices. Collective farming in Romania was an attempt to implement the USSR's communist blueprint. These attempts often fell short. By strictly adhering to this Soviet blueprint, the implementation of communism in Romania inevitably created dilemmas and contributions that led to violence. Kligman and Verdery state "The violence collectivization, emerges then, less, as an abhoration than as a product of sociocultural shaping and of deep problems with how the soviet blueprint came to be implemented... instead of a gradual and integrated process of moving from one form of society to another, Romanian society in the Soviet orbit was being completely rearticulated, a process in which violence was inevitable."[17]
On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."[17]
Bulgaria
[edit]Collective farms in the People's Republic of Bulgaria, introduced in 1945, were called Labour Cooperative Agricultural Farm (Bulgarian: Трудово кооперативно земеделско стопанство, romanized: Trudovo kooperativno zemedelsko stopanstvo).[18]
Hungary
[edit]In Hungary, agricultural collectivization was attempted several times between 1948 and 1956, with disastrous results, until it was finally successful in the early 1960s under János Kádár. The first serious attempt at collectivization based on Stalinist agricultural policy was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants to join cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. By the early 1950s, only one-quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives.[19]
In the spring of 1955 the drive for collectivization was renewed, again using physical force to encourage membership, but this second wave also ended in dismal failure. After the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opted for a more gradual collectivization drive. The main wave of collectivization occurred between 1959 and 1961, and at the end of this period more than 95% of agricultural land in Hungary had become the property of collective farms. In February 1961, the Central Committee declared that collectivization had been completed.[20]
Czechoslovakia
[edit]In Czechoslovakia, centralized land reforms after World War I allowed for the distribution of most of the land to peasants and the poor, and created large groups of relatively well-to-do farmers (though village poor still existed). These groups showed no support for communist ideals. In 1945, immediately after World War II, new land reform started with the new socialist government. The first phase involved a confiscation of properties of Germans, Hungarians, and collaborators with the Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called Beneš decrees. The second phase, promulgated by so-called Ďuriš's laws (after the Communist Minister of Agriculture), in fact meant a complete revision of the pre-war land reform and tried to reduce maximal private property to 150 hectares (370 acres) of agricultural land and 250 hectares (620 acres) of any land.[21]
The third and final phase forbade possession of land above 50 hectares (120 acres) for one family. This phase was carried out in April 1948, two months after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took power by force. Farms started to be collectivized, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. The most common form of collectivization was agricultural cooperative (Czech: Jednotné zemědělské družstvo, JZD; Slovak: Jednotné roľnícke družstvo, JRD). The collectivization was implemented in three stages (1949–1952, 1953–1956, 1956–1969) and officially ended with the 1960 implementation of the constitution establishing the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which made private ownership illegal.
Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated. Their productivity was low since they provided tiny salaries and no pensions, and they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common, and food became scarce. Seeing the massive outflow of people from agriculture into cities, the government started to massively subsidize the cooperatives in order to make the standard of living of farmers equal to that of city inhabitants; this was the long-term official policy of the government. Funds, machinery, and fertilizers were provided; young people from villages were forced to study agriculture; and students were regularly sent (involuntarily) to help in cooperatives.
Subsidies and constant pressure destroyed the remaining private farmers; only a handful of them remained after the 1960s. The lifestyle of villagers had eventually reached the level of cities, and village poverty was eliminated. Czechoslovakia was again able to produce enough food for its citizens. The price of this success was a huge waste of resources because the cooperatives had no incentive to improve efficiency. Every piece of land was cultivated regardless of the expense involved, and the soil became heavily polluted with chemicals. Also, the intensive use of heavy machinery damaged topsoil. Furthermore, the cooperatives were infamous for over-employment.
In the late 1970s, the economy of Czechoslovakia entered into stagnation, and the state-owned companies were unable to deal with advent of modern technologies. A few agricultural companies (where the rules were less strict than in state companies) used this situation to start providing high-tech products. For example, the only way to buy a PC-compatible computer in the late 1980s was to get it (for an extremely high price) from one agricultural company acting as a reseller.
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 subsidies to agriculture were halted with devastating effect. Most of the cooperatives had problems competing with technologically advanced foreign competition and were unable to obtain investment to improve their situation. Quite a large percentage of them collapsed. The others that remained were typically insufficiently funded, lacking competent management, without new machinery and living from day to day. Employment in the agricultural sector dropped significantly (from approximately 25% of the population to approximately 1%).
East Germany
[edit]Collective farms in the German Democratic Republic were typically called Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG), and corresponded closely to the Soviet kolkhoz. East Germany also had a few state-owned farms which were equivalent to the Soviet sovkhoz, which were called the Volkseigenes Gut (VEG). The structure of farms in what was called East Elbia until German partition was dominated by latifundia, and thus the land reform which was justified on denazification grounds[22][23] and with the aim of destroying the Prussian Junker class – which had been hated by the left during the Weimar Republic and which was blamed for Prussian militarism and the authoritarian tendencies of the German Empire and later Nazi Germany – was initially popular with many small farmers and landless peasants. East German President Wilhelm Pieck coined the slogan Junkerland in Bauernhand! ("Junker land into farmer's hand!") to promote land reform, which was initially pledged to be more moderate than full-scale collectivization. Although the ruling Socialist Unity Party and the Soviet Military Administration in Germany promised to allow large landowners to keep their land, they were expelled as the LPG were introduced in 1953. After 1959 all farmers were required to surrender independently owned land and join the LPGs.[24] Similarly to the Soviet Union, ultimately most of the land was transferred into de jure or de facto state controlled entities with the former farmers becoming employees – now of the state instead of the erstwhile Junker class.[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][excessive citations]
Poland
[edit]The Polish name of a collective farm was rolnicza spółdzielnia produkcyjna, 'agricultural production cooperative'. Collectivisation in Poland was stopped in 1956; later, nationalisation was supported.
Yugoslavia
[edit]Collective farming was introduced as a League of Communists of Yugoslavia government policy throughout the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II, by taking away land from wealthy pre-war owners and limiting possessions in private ownership first to 25, and later to 10 hectares. The large, state-owned farms were known as "Agricultural cooperatives" (zemljoradničke zadruge in Serbo-Croatian) and farmers working on them had to meet production quotas in order to satisfy the needs of the populace. This system was largely abolished in the 1950s. See: Law of 23 August 1945 with amendments until 1 December 1948.[32][better source needed]
China
[edit]At the end of the Land Reform movement, individual families in China owned the land they farmed, paid taxes as households, and sold grain at prices set by the state.[33]: 109 Rural collectivization began soon after the CCP announced its 1953 "general line for the transition to socialism".[34] Over the next six years, collectivization took several incrementally progressing forms: mutual aid groups, primitive cooperatives, and people's communes.[34] As London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Lin Chun notes, researchers agree that communization proceeded on a largely voluntary basis that avoided both the violence and sabotage that occurred during the Soviet collectivization.[34] Like Professor Barry Naughton, she observes that China's collectivization proceeded smoothly in part because, unlike the Soviet experience, a network of state institutions already existed in the countryside.[34] Similarly, Professor Edward Friedman describes China's collectivization process as a "miracle of miracles".[35]
During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (chuji nongye hezuoshe).[33]: 109 In the complex system of beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, farmers received a share of the harvest based on a combination of how much labor and how much land they contributed to the cooperative.[33]: 109–110
By June 1956, over 60% of rural households had been collectivized into higher-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (gaoji nongye hezuoshe), a structure that was similar to Soviet collective farmering via kolkhozy.[33]: 110 In these cooperatives, tens of households pooled land and draft animals.[33]: 110 Adult members of the cooperative were credited with work points based on how much labor they had provided at which tasks.[33]: 110 At the end of the year, the collective deducted taxes and fixed-price sales to the state, and the cooperative retained seed for the next year as well as some investment and welfare funds.[33]: 110 The collective then distributed to the households the remainder of the harvest and some of the money received from sales to the state.[33]: 110 The distribution was based partly on work points accrued by the adult members of a household, and partly at a standard rate by age and sex.[33]: 110 These cooperatives also lent small amounts of land back to households individually on which the households could grow crops to consume directly or sell at market.[33]: 110–111 Apart from the large-scale communization during the Great Leap Forward, higher-level agricultural producers' collective were generally the dominant form of rural collectivization in China.[33]: 111
During The Great Leap Forward, the Mao Zedong-led Communist Party rapidly convert the Chinese economy to a socialist society through rapid industrialization and large scale collectivization.[36] Later, the country was hit by massive floods and droughts. This, combined with the usage of severely flawed policies of Lysenkoism and the Four Pests Campaign, caused "The Great Chinese Famine of 1959," where nearly 30 million people died of hunger. The party officially blamed floods and droughts for the famine; however, it was clear to the party members at the party meetings that famine was caused mostly by their own policies.[37] Recent studies also demonstrate that it was career incentives within the politburo system as well as political radicalism that led to the great famine.[38]
Collectivization of land via the commune system facilitated China's rapid industrialization through the state's control of food production and procurement.[39] This allowed the state to accelerate the process of capital accumulation, ultimately laying the successful foundation of physical and human capital for the economic growth of China's reform and opening up.[39] During the early and middle 1950s, collectivization was an important factor in the major change in Chinese agriculture during that period, the dramatic increase in irrigated land.[33]: 111 For example, collectivization was a factor that contributed to the introduction of double cropping in the south, a labor-intensive process which greatly increased agricultural yields.[33]: 116
Both land reform movement and collectivization largely left in place the social systems in the ethnic minority group areas of Chinese Central Asia and Zomia.[33]: 118 These areas generally underwent collectivization in the form of agricultural producers' cooperatives during winter of 1957 through 1958, having skipped the small peasant landholder stage that had followed land reform elsewhere in China.[33]: 122 Central Tibet was under the joint administration of the People's Liberation Army and the Dalai Lama's theocracy until 1959, and consequently did not experience land reform or collectivization until 1960 in agricultural areas and 1966 in pastoral areas.[33]: 119
After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping reformed the collective farming method. From this time, nearly all Chinese crops began to blossom, not just grain. The reform included the removal of land from rich land owners for use of agricultural land for peasants, but not ownership. This policy increased production and helped reverse the effects of The Great Leap Forward. The two main reasons why China succeeded was because 1) the government chose to make gradual changes, which kept the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party and 2) because the reform process began from the bottom and later expanded to the top. Throughout the reform process, the Communist Party reacted positively to the bottom-up reform initiatives that emerged from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping described the reform process as "fording the river by feeling for the stones". This statement refers to the Chinese people who called for the reforms they wanted by "placing the stones at his feet" and he would then just approve the reforms the people wanted. The peasants started their own "household responsibility system" apart from the government. After Chinese trade was privately deemed successful, all Deng had to do was approve its legalization. This increased competition between farmers domestically and internationally, meaning the low wage working class began to be known worldwide, increasing the Chinese FDI.[40]
A 2017 study found that Chinese peasants slaughtered massive numbers of draft animals as a response to collectivization, as this would allow them to keep the meat and hide, and not transfer the draft animals to the collectives.[41] The study estimates that "the animal loss during the movement was 12 to 15 percent, or 7.4-9.5 million dead. Grain output dropped by 7 percent due to lower animal inputs and lower productivity."[41]
Mongolia
[edit]North Korea
[edit]In the late 1990s, the collective farming system collapsed under a strain of droughts. Estimates of deaths due to starvation ranged into the millions, although the government did not allow outside observers to survey the extent of the famine. Aggravating the severity of the famine, the government was accused of diverting international relief supplies to its armed forces. Agriculture in North Korea has suffered tremendously from natural disasters, a lack of fertile land, and government mismanagement, often causing the nation to rely on foreign aid as its primary source of food.
Vietnam
[edit]The Democratic Republic of Vietnam implemented collective farming although de jure private ownership existed. Starting in 1958 collective farming was pushed such that by 1960, 85% of farmers and 70% of farmlands were collectivized including those seized by force.[42] Collectivization however was seen by the communist leadership as a half-measure when compared to full state ownership.[43]
Following the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, South Vietnam briefly came under the authority of a Provisional Revolutionary Government, a puppet state under military occupation by North Vietnam, before being officially reunified with the North under Communist rule as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976. Upon taking control, the Vietnamese communists banned other political parties, arrested suspects believed to have collaborated with the United States and embarked on a mass campaign of collectivization of farms and factories. Private land ownership was "transformed" to subsume under State and collective ownership.[44] Reconstruction of the war-ravaged country was slow and serious humanitarian and economic problems confronted the communist regime.
In an historic shift in 1986, the Communist Party of Vietnam implemented free-market reforms known as Đổi Mới (Renovation). With the authority of the state remaining unchallenged, private enterprise, deregulation and foreign investment were encouraged. Land ownership nonetheless is the sole prerogative of the state. The economy of Vietnam has achieved rapid growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction and housing, exports and foreign investment. However, the power of the Communist Party of Vietnam over all organs of government remains firm, preventing full land ownership. Conflicts between the state and private farmers over land rights have grown with the potential to spark social and political instability.[45]
Despite the reforms however, over 50% of all farms in Vietnam remain collective cooperatives (over 15,000 farming cooperatives in Vietnam), and almost all farmers being members of some kind of cooperative.[46] The state also heavily encourages collective cooperative farming over private farming.[47]
Cuba
[edit]In the initial years that followed the Cuban Revolution, government authorities experimented with agricultural and farming production cooperatives. Between 1977 and 1983, farmers began to collectivize into CPAs – Cooperativa de Producción Agropecuaria (Agricultural Production Cooperatives). Farmers were encouraged to sell their land to the state for the establishment of a cooperative farm, receiving payments for a period of 20 years while also sharing in the fruits of the CPA. Joining a CPA allowed individuals who were previously dispersed throughout the countryside to move to a centralized location with increased access to electricity, medical care, housing, and schools. Democratic practice tends to be limited to business decisions and is constrained by the centralized economic planning of the Cuban system.
Another type of agricultural production cooperative in Cuba is UBPC – Unidad Básica de Producción Cooperativa (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production). The law authorizing the creation of UBPCs was passed on 20 September 1993. It has been used to transform many state farms into UBPCs, similar to the transformation of Russian sovkhozes (state farms) into kolkhozes (collective farms) since 1992. The law granted indefinite usufruct to the workers of the UBPC in line with its goal of linking the workers to the land. It established material incentives for increased production by tying workers' earnings to the overall production of the UBPC, and increased managerial autonomy and workers' participation in the management of the workplace.
Tanzania
[edit]The Tanzanian socialist approach of ujamaa supported by President Julius Nyerere focused on collectivizing ownership of property and communal organization of agriculture in the Tanzanian countryside.[48]: 98 This re-organization of the countryside began on a voluntary and experimental basis.[48]: 98 From 1973 to 1975, these goals were pursued through the forced villagization process of Operation Vijiji.[48]: 98
Laos
[edit]Other collective farming
[edit]Europe
[edit]In the European Union, collective farming is fairly common and agricultural cooperatives hold a 40% market share among the 27 member states. In the Netherlands, cooperative agriculture holds a market share of approximately 70%, second only to Finland.[49] In France, cooperative agriculture represents 40% of the national food industry's production and nearly 90 Billion € in gross revenue, covering one out of three food brands in the country.[50][51]
There are also intentional communities which practice collective agriculture.[52][53] There is a growing number of community supported agriculture initiatives, some of which operate under consumer/worker governance, that could be considered collective farms.
India
[edit]In Indian villages a single field (normally a plot of three to five acres) may be farmed collectively by the villagers, who each offer labour as a devotional offering, possibly for one or two days per cropping season. The resulting crop belongs to no one individual, and is used as an offering. The labour input is the offering of the peasant in their role as priests. The wealth generated by the sale of the produce belongs to the Gods and hence is Apaurusheya or impersonal. Shrambhakti (labour contributed as devotional offering) is the key instrument for generation of internal resources. The benefits of the harvest are most often redistributed in the village for common good as well as individual need – not as loan or charity, but as divine grace (prasad). The recipient is under no obligation to repay it and no interest need be paid on such gifts.[citation needed]
Israel
[edit]Collective farming was also implemented in kibbutzim in Israel, which began in 1909 as a unique combination of Zionism and socialism – known as Labor Zionism. The concept has faced occasional criticism as economically inefficient and over-reliant on subsidized credit.[54]
A lesser-known type of collective farm in Israel is moshav shitufi (lit. collective settlement), where production and services are managed collectively, as in a kibbutz, but consumption decisions are left to individual households. In terms of cooperative organization, moshav shitufi is distinct from the much more common moshav (or moshav ovdim), essentially a village-level service cooperative, not a collective farm.
In 2006 there were 40 moshavim shitufi'im in Israel, compared with 267 kibbutzim.[55]
Collective farming in Israel differs from collectivism in communist states in that it is voluntary. However, including moshavim, various forms of collective farming have traditionally been and remain the primary agricultural model, as there are only a small number of completely private farms in Israel outside of the moshavim.
Mexico
[edit]In Mexico the Ejido system provided poor farmers with collective use rights to agricultural land.
Canada and United States
[edit]The Anabaptist Hutterites have farmed communally since the 16th century. Most of them now live on the Canadian Prairies and the northern Great Plains of the United States, as well as in Southern Ontario in Canada.[56]
Until recently Western Canada had a centralised wheat board where farmers were usually obligated to sell their wheat to the province which sold the product at a high collective price. Ontario currently has a milk board which obliges most milk producers to sell their milk to the province at a regulated quality and price.
A movement of voluntary collective farming started in 2008 in the Research Triangle under the name of crop mob. The idea spread throughout the United States and less than 10 years later this particular type of incidental, spontaneous, social-media driven collective farming was reported in over 70 places.[57]
In popular culture
[edit]In the 2021 Telugu film Sreekaram, the main protagonist encourages people for a community farming.
The 1929 Soviet film The General Line features Martha and a group of peasants organizing a kolkhoz. The film began production as a promotion of the Trotskyist Left Opposition viewpoint on collectivization. After the rise of Joseph Stalin and expulsion of his rival Leon Trotsky, it was heavily re-edited into the pro-Stalinist film The Old and the New.
The 1930 Soviet Ukrainian film Earth features a peasant encouraging his village in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to embrace collectivization, which they do after he is killed by kulaks.
See also
[edit]- Camphill Movement – Special education
- Dekulakization – Soviet repression of prosperous peasants (1929–1932)
- Work unit – Danwei; a state institution of employment and political organization in China
References
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{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link) - ^ Richard Overy: Russia's War, 1997
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- ^ A. Sarris and D. Gavrilescu, "Restructuring of farms and agricultural systems in Romania", in: J. Swinnen, A. Buckwell, and E. Mathijs, eds., Agricultural Privatisation, Land Reform and Farm Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 1997.
- ^ a b Kligman, G., & Verdery, K. (2011). Peasants under siege: the collectivization of Romanian agriculture, 1949–1962. Princeton University Press.
- ^ "Безплатен Държавен Вестник издание - Официален раздел , брой 95 от 25.IV.1945". 23 October 2023. Archived from the original on 23 October 2023. Retrieved 23 October 2023.
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- ^ "Gerade auf LeMO gesehen: LeMO Kapitel: Anfänge der Planwirtschaft" (in German).
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- ^ "Friedrich II. – Friedrich der Große" (in German). 26 October 2012.
- ^ Zank, Wolfgang (12 October 1990). "Junkerland in Bauernhand!". Zeit (in German). Retrieved 3 March 2022.
- ^ Fischer, Fritz (29 March 1991). "Rückkehr nach Preußen? Die Bundesrepublik sollte auch künftig von Bonn aus regiert werden". Zeit (in German). Retrieved 3 March 2022.
- ^ "Adelshäuser als Kuhställe oder Trinkerheilanstalten". Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (in German). 4 December 2014. Retrieved 3 March 2022.
- ^ "German translation of the Law of 23 August 1945 with amendments until 1 December 1948". Archived from the original on 17 April 2016. Retrieved 27 June 2022.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Harrell, Stevan (2023). An Ecological History of Modern China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-75171-9.
- ^ a b c d Lin, Chun (2006). The Transformation of Chinese Socialism. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press. pp. 78–79. ISBN 978-0-8223-3785-0. OCLC 63178961.
- ^ The transition to socialism in China. Mark Selden, Victor D. Lippit, Association for Asian Studies. Meeting. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 1982. p. 205. ISBN 978-1-315-62791-5. OCLC 956466048.
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- ^ a b Pieke, Frank N; Hofman, Bert, eds. (2022). CPC Futures The New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. p. 55. doi:10.56159/eai.52060. ISBN 978-981-18-5206-0. OCLC 1354535847.
- ^ "How China Won and Russia Lost". hoover.org. Retrieved 27 March 2018.
- ^ a b Chen, Shuo; Lan, Xiaohuan (2017). "There Will Be Killing: Collectivization and Death of Draft Animals". American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 9 (4): 58–77. doi:10.1257/app.20160247. ISSN 1945-7782.
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External links
[edit]- Stalin and Collectivization, by Scott J. Reid Archived 23 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- "The Collectivization 'Genocide'", in Another View of Stalin, by Ludo Martens
- Tony Cliff "Marxism and the collectivisation of agriculture"
- Kiernan, Ben (2007). Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale University Press. pp. 724. ISBN 978-0-300-10098-3.
Collective farming
View on GrokipediaConceptual Foundations
Definition and Core Principles
Collective farming is an agricultural organization in which multiple farmers consolidate their individual landholdings, livestock, tools, and other productive assets into a single joint enterprise, typically managed cooperatively or under state supervision to achieve economies of scale and centralized control over production. This system emerged prominently in 20th-century socialist states, where it involved the expropriation or voluntary pooling of private farms to form collective units like Soviet kolkhozy (collective farms) or Chinese people's communes, with output directed toward state quotas rather than market sales.[4] Unlike private farming, which relies on individual ownership and profit motives, collective farming subordinates personal initiative to group or national goals, often requiring members to contribute labor collectively while retaining limited personal plots for subsistence.[5] At its core, the system rests on the principle of socialized ownership of land and major capital goods, eliminating private property rights in agriculture to prevent capitalist exploitation and enable planned resource allocation.[6] Labor is organized communally, with workdays (trudodni) or brigades tracking contributions to determine shares of harvest or income, theoretically incentivizing participation through collective prosperity rather than direct individual rewards.[5] Production decisions, including crop selection and quotas, are centralized—either by farm committees or state authorities—to align with broader economic directives, such as industrialization funding via grain procurements in the Soviet Union starting in 1929.[7] Distribution mechanisms emphasize equality or need-based allocation, with surpluses reinvested in the collective or surrendered to the state, though empirical outcomes often revealed misaligned incentives, as individual effort yielded diffuse benefits prone to free-riding without strong enforcement.[8] These principles derive from Marxist-Leninist ideology, which posits that collective forms resolve class antagonisms in the countryside by uniting peasants against kulak (prosperous farmer) influence, fostering socialist transformation through scaled operations and mechanization.[7] However, implementation frequently deviated from voluntary cooperation, incorporating coercive elements to overcome resistance, as evidenced by the Soviet model's emphasis on rapid consolidation to extract resources for urban growth despite peasant opposition documented in declassified archives from the 1930s.[4] In theory, the structure promised higher productivity via shared expertise and inputs, but causal analyses highlight inherent incentive dilution, where marginal personal gains from extra effort approach zero in large groups, contrasting with private farming's alignment of self-interest and output.[8]Theoretical Underpinnings and Incentive Structures
Collective farming's theoretical foundations originate in Marxist doctrine, which critiques capitalist agriculture as inherently exploitative due to private ownership of land and the extraction of surplus value from peasant labor. Karl Marx argued in Capital (1867) that the concentration of land in fewer hands under capitalism displaces smallholders, but under socialism, the abolition of private property would enable communal control over production, fostering cooperation and eliminating class antagonisms in the countryside. This view was extended by Vladimir Lenin, who in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) analyzed the agrarian question, advocating for the proletariat to lead peasants toward collectivization as a step beyond individual farming toward socialist integration, though he initially emphasized state capitalism as transitional. Joseph Stalin later formalized this in Soviet policy, positing collective farms (kolkhozy) as mechanisms to socialize agriculture, pool resources, and achieve planned output aligned with industrial needs, rejecting market-driven incentives as bourgeois relics.[9] Incentive structures under collective farming theory rely on centralized planning and collective ethos rather than individual profit motives. Proponents, drawing from Marxist-Leninist principles, assumed that ideological commitment to socialism would motivate labor, supplemented by state-set quotas and minimal private plots for personal consumption to sustain basic effort. However, economic analyses highlight inherent principal-agent problems, where farm managers (agents) face misaligned incentives with distant state planners (principals), leading to information asymmetries and shirking, as managers prioritize quotas over long-term productivity without personal ownership stakes. Workers within collectives encounter moral hazard, exerting suboptimal effort due to egalitarian reward systems that distribute output regardless of individual contribution, akin to free-rider dynamics where personal gains from extra work are diluted across the group.[10] Critiques from public choice and transaction cost economics underscore how collective systems exacerbate agency costs through weak monitoring and enforcement, as diffuse ownership undermines residual claimancy—the right to benefits from one's efforts—resulting in underinvestment in soil fertility and innovation.[11] Without market price signals to allocate resources efficiently, theoretical models predict persistent shortages, as seen in game-theoretic representations of collective action where Nash equilibria favor minimal cooperation over maximal output.[12] Empirical extensions of these theories, such as in Chinese communes, confirm that overly egalitarian pay scales failed to elicit sufficient labor intensity, contributing to productivity lags relative to private farming benchmarks.[10] These incentive misalignments stem causally from the severance of property rights from effort, prioritizing collective goals over individual rationality, often leading to reliance on coercion rather than voluntary alignment.Historical Precedents Before Modern Collectivization
Pre-20th Century Communal Practices
Communal agricultural practices predating the 20th century often arose from customary land tenure systems emphasizing collective resource management and labor sharing among kinship or village groups, rather than centralized state imposition or ideological collectivism. These arrangements typically involved periodic land redistribution, communal oversight of commons, or clan-based cultivation to mitigate risks from variable yields and ensure group subsistence, though individual household labor remained primary in many cases. Such systems were documented across Eurasia, the Americas, and other regions, with empirical evidence from historical records showing their adaptation to local ecologies and social structures.[13] In medieval and early modern Europe, particularly England, the open-field system exemplified partial communalism in arable farming. Villages divided unfenced fields into scattered strips allocated to peasant households, but cultivation followed synchronized rotations—such as the three-field method leaving one-third fallow annually—and communal regulations governed grazing on stubble and commons to prevent overexploitation. This cooperative framework, persisting into the 18th century in some areas, reduced individual risk through shared practices but constrained innovation due to veto powers within assemblies; economic analyses indicate it supported population growth from around 2 million in England circa 1086 to 5.5 million by 1700, albeit with yields limited to 7-10 bushels per acre for wheat. Emerging parliamentary enclosures, accelerating from the mid-18th century into the early 19th, demonstrated higher productivity by consolidating fragmented holdings, enabling crop experimentation, and incentivizing investments, with overall agricultural output rising as enclosed farms adopted improved rotations and reduced fallow land.[14][15] Hypothetically, large-scale agricultural collectivization in the 1810 historical context would not have succeeded. Pre-industrial agriculture lacked mechanization, synthetic fertilizers, and scientific breeding methods essential for scaling collective operations efficiently, limitations that contributed to famines even in partially modernized 20th-century collectivizations. Incentive structures under collectivization discouraged individual effort and investment, fostering peasant resistance and output declines mirroring later empirical failures. Communal systems like Europe's open fields proved less productive than contemporaneous private enclosures, which boosted yields through specialization, secure property rights, and capital improvements—trends gaining traction around 1810. The Russian obshchina, or mir, represented a more explicit form of communal landholding among peasants from at least the 16th century until the emancipation reforms of 1861. Village assemblies periodically repartitioned arable land among households based on family size and labor capacity, while collectively managing meadows, forests, and taxes owed to landlords or the state; by the mid-19th century, over 80% of peasant households operated under this system in European Russia. This structure fostered egalitarian redistribution but often perpetuated low productivity, as evidenced by grain yields averaging 5-7 chetveriks per desyatina (roughly 6-8 bushels per acre), attributed to fragmented holdings and resistance to individual enclosures.[13][16] In the Americas, the Inca Empire's ayllu system integrated communal farming within kinship clans from the 13th century onward. Ayllus collectively held lands divided into portions for family use, state tribute (via mit'a labor corvée), and religious offerings, with members performing reciprocal ayni labor exchanges for terracing, irrigation, and harvesting crops like potatoes and quinoa; archaeological data from sites like Machu Picchu reveal terraced fields supporting densities of up to 150 persons per square kilometer in highlands. Similarly, among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, established around 1142, matrilineal clans communally worked longhouse-adjacent fields cleared by men and cultivated by women using the "Three Sisters" intercropping of corn, beans, and squash, yielding sustainable outputs that sustained populations of 20,000-40,000 by the 17th century without plows or draft animals.[17][18] These indigenous practices emphasized women's oversight of agriculture, with fields belonging to clans rather than individuals, enabling food security through diversified plots rotated every 10-20 years to preserve soil fertility, as confirmed by paleoenvironmental studies showing stable maize pollen records from 1000 CE.[19]19th-Century Experiments and Influences
In the early 19th century, utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier proposed communal models that emphasized shared agricultural labor as a foundation for self-sufficient societies, influencing later collective farming ideologies despite their limited practical success.[20][21] Owen, a Welsh industrialist, advocated for cooperative villages where land and production would be collectively managed, arguing that environmental and social reforms could eliminate poverty through joint farming efforts.[20] Fourier envisioned phalansteries—cooperative communities of 1,600–1,800 people organized into hierarchical "passions-based" work groups, with agriculture forming the economic core through diversified crops and animal husbandry to ensure year-round labor appeal and productivity.[22] These theoretical frameworks highlighted potential efficiencies in communal resource allocation but overlooked persistent human incentives for individual effort, as evidenced by subsequent experimental failures.[23] Robert Owen's most prominent experiment, New Harmony in Indiana, launched in 1825 on 30,000 acres purchased for communal use, directly tested collective agriculture.[20] The settlement divided operations into departments, including agriculture, where residents collectively farmed grains, vegetables, and livestock to support the population, which peaked at around 1,000 participants from diverse backgrounds.[24] However, the venture collapsed by 1828 due to internal divisions, inadequate work discipline, and free-rider problems, where many newcomers contributed minimally while consuming shared outputs, yielding minimal agricultural surplus and highlighting the misalignment between collective ownership and personal motivation.[25] Similar Owenite attempts in Britain, such as Harmony Hall (1839–1845) in Hampshire, involved 200–300 members on 1,200 acres focused on market gardening and grain production but dissolved amid financial losses and disputes over labor shares.[26] In the United States, transcendentalist and socialist-inspired communes further explored collective farming. Brook Farm, established in 1841 near Boston on a 175-acre site, combined intellectual pursuits with shared agricultural labor, where members rotated tasks in dairy, crop cultivation, and horticulture to embody self-reliance.[27] The community attracted figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne but faltered by 1847 after a disastrous fire destroyed infrastructure, compounded by low productivity from voluntary but uneven labor commitment, resulting in chronic debt and abandonment.[27] Étienne Cabet's Icarian movement, inspired by his 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie, established agricultural communes starting with a failed 1848 Texas settlement, relocating to Nauvoo, Illinois, and later Corning, Iowa, where by 1855 around 500 members managed mills, shops, and farmland producing staple crops through communal division of labor.[28] These groups achieved temporary stability via strict rules and elected oversight but fragmented over leadership conflicts and subsistence-level yields, underscoring scalability issues in collective agriculture without coercive enforcement.[29] Fourier's ideas, though rarely fully realized, indirectly shaped American Fourierist associations in the 1840s, such as the North American Phalanx in New Jersey (1843–1855), which operated 700 acres of orchards, vineyards, and fisheries under associative labor principles, generating profits through diversified output before dissolving due to a mill fire and member apathy.[30] Collectively, these 19th-century ventures—numbering over 100 in the U.S. alone between 1800 and 1859—demonstrated short-term communal harmony but empirically validated critiques of inefficient incentive structures, as agricultural underperformance stemmed from diffused responsibility and lack of private stakes, informing both socialist aspirations and warnings against large-scale collectivization.[25][23]Forced Collectivization in Socialist Regimes
Soviet Union: Policies, Resistance, and Immediate Consequences
Forced collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union began in earnest during the winter of 1929–1930, as part of Joseph Stalin's First Five-Year Plan aimed at rapid industrialization through extraction of grain surpluses from the peasantry.[7] Policies mandated the consolidation of individual peasant holdings into state-controlled kolkhozy (collective farms), where land, livestock, and tools were pooled under central directives, with output quotas enforced by party officials and OGPU security forces.[7] In December 1929, Stalin explicitly called for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," targeting wealthier peasants deemed resistant to socialization, with directives classifying households into categories for expropriation or deportation.[31] By February 1930, official reports claimed over 50% of peasant households had been collectivized, though this pace prompted Stalin's March 1930 article "Dizziness from Success," which temporarily blamed local excesses and allowed some de-collectivization before renewed enforcement.[7] Peasant resistance manifested in widespread acts of sabotage, including the mass slaughter of livestock—approximately 50% of cattle and 40% of horses were killed between 1929 and 1933—to prevent confiscation and undermine collective viability.[32] Kulaks and middling peasants organized petitions, hid grain, and in some regions formed armed groups or destroyed farm infrastructure, prompting violent reprisals; dekulakization campaigns deported around 2 million individuals, with direct executions numbering about 30,000, often summary shootings during raids.[33] A third wave of deportations in 1930–1931 alone affected 1.244 million people (265,000 families), primarily to remote labor settlements in Siberia and the Urals, where mortality rates exceeded 20% due to exposure, starvation, and forced labor.[34] These measures, justified by Soviet authorities as countering "class enemies," systematically dismantled private incentives, as peasants received minimal compensation and faced punitive grain requisitions far exceeding prior NEP-era levels.[31] Immediate consequences included a sharp decline in agricultural output, with grain production falling 20–30% in 1930–1932 due to disrupted planting, loss of experienced farmers, and motivational collapse under quota pressures.[35] The 1932–1933 famine, exacerbated by excessive procurements (e.g., Ukraine's quota raised to 7.7 million tons in 1932 despite shortfalls), resulted in 6–8 million deaths across the USSR, with ethnic Ukrainians suffering disproportionately—up to 92% of excess mortality attributable to targeted policies like blacklisting villages and sealing borders.[2][36] In Ukraine alone, known as the Holodomor, deaths reached 3.9–4.5 million, driven not by harvest failure but by state seizure of food reserves and prohibition of private sales, leading to widespread cannibalism and depopulation of rural areas.[37] Economically, while collectivization enabled short-term grain exports to fund industry (over 1.8 million tons shipped in 1932–1933), it entrenched chronic inefficiencies, with livestock herds halved and per capita food availability dropping below subsistence levels until the late 1930s.[35]Eastern European Variants: Implementation and Adaptations
Following World War II, communist regimes in Eastern Europe, established under Soviet influence between 1945 and 1948, initiated forced collectivization campaigns modeled on the Soviet kolkhoz system to consolidate agricultural production under state control.[38] These efforts spanned from 1945 to 1962, involving land expropriation from private owners and mandatory enrollment of peasants into collective farms (kolkhozes) or state farms (sovkhozes), often accompanied by coercion, propaganda, and suppression of resistance.[39] By the early 1950s, collectivization accelerated amid Stalinist pressures, with targets set for 70-90% of arable land under collectives in most countries, though actual implementation varied due to peasant opposition and local agricultural structures.[40] In Romania, collectivization commenced in 1949 and persisted until its official completion on March 31, 1962, despite widespread peasant resistance that included sabotage, flight to urban areas, and armed confrontations; the process entailed the near-total confiscation of private holdings, merging them into over 19,000 collectives covering 96% of arable land by the end.[41] Authorities employed tactics such as tax penalties on private farms, forced grain requisitions, and incentives like machinery access to compel participation, resulting in documented violence and destruction by party cadres.[42] Post-1962, adaptations included integrating collectives into centralized planning with five-year goals emphasizing mechanization, yet agricultural output stagnated relative to pre-communist levels due to disincentives for individual effort.[43] Poland's variant diverged significantly, with full-scale collectivization largely abandoned by 1956 following peasant uprisings and the Polish October events, achieving only about 12% of farmland in collectives by the regime's end; instead, adaptations preserved a hybrid system allowing private smallholdings, which maintained higher productivity through retained property rights and market incentives.[44] In Hungary, initial pushes in the early 1950s faced violent resistance, leading to partial reversals after the 1956 Revolution, but subsequent adaptations under János Kádár introduced "voluntary" collectives with work-point systems mimicking private remuneration to boost participation, though collectives still exhibited lower labor productivity than surviving private plots.[45] East Germany's implementation from 1952 onward incorporated grassroots mobilization and Soviet-style planning, reaching 85% collectivization by 1960, with adaptations like specialized production cooperatives (LPG Types I-III) permitting graduated private elements to mitigate inefficiencies.[46] Bulgaria pursued rapid collectivization from 1948, achieving over 80% coverage by 1958 through intense state pressure and popular mobilization campaigns, but faced adaptations in the form of flexible organizational forms to accommodate regional differences in farming practices.[40] Across the region, empirical data indicate collectives suffered from over-employment and productivity losses—e.g., Hungarian private farms outperformed collectives in total factor productivity—attributable to weakened incentives under communal ownership, as private plots often yielded disproportionate output despite comprising minimal land.[47] [48] These outcomes underscored causal failures in incentive structures, prompting post-Stalinist reforms like decollectivization threats in Poland and market-oriented tweaks elsewhere, though systemic inefficiencies persisted until the 1989 collapses.[49]Chinese Collectivization: Great Leap Forward and Aftermath
The Great Leap Forward, initiated by Mao Zedong in 1958, accelerated China's collectivization by merging existing cooperatives into approximately 26,500 people's communes, each encompassing an average of 5,000 households and vast tracts of arable land.[50][51] These communes centralized control over agriculture, abolishing private land ownership and implementing communal production brigades and teams, with resources pooled for collective labor in farming, irrigation projects, and backyard steel furnaces.[52][53] Cadres enforced exaggerated production quotas through mass mobilization campaigns, communal dining halls that discouraged individual effort by providing "free" meals, and diversion of rural labor from fields to industrial targets, aiming to surpass British steel output in 15 years.[54][55] Agricultural output initially appeared to surge due to falsified reports incentivized by political pressures on local officials, but actual grain production fell sharply by 1959-1961 amid disrupted planting, poor harvests, and resource misallocation.[52][56] The ensuing Great Chinese Famine resulted in excess mortality estimated at 16.5 to 45 million, with scholarly consensus around 30 million deaths from starvation and related diseases, far exceeding official Chinese figures of 16.5 million.[57][3][52] While drought contributed in some regions, primary causes were institutional: excessive state grain procurement (up to 30-40% of output) based on inflated data, continued exports of millions of tons amid shortages, wasteful communal kitchens depleting reserves, and weakened work incentives under collective ownership.[3][58][55] By late 1960, famine reports prompted partial policy retreats; communal dining was largely abandoned by 1961, private plots and household sideline production were reinstated, and procurement quotas reduced, allowing grain output to recover to pre-Leap levels by 1962.[52][59] Mao ceded day-to-day control to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who decentralized some commune operations while retaining the structure nominally.[52] The disaster eroded faith in radical collectivization, foreshadowing the 1978-1984 household responsibility system under Deng, which devolved land-use rights to families, boosted productivity through market incentives, and dismantled communes by 1984, contributing to sustained agricultural growth averaging 5-6% annually thereafter.[59][60]Other State-Driven or Regional Implementations
Asian Cases Beyond China: Vietnam, North Korea, and Mongolia
In Vietnam, agricultural collectivization commenced in the North following land reforms completed by 1956, with the formation of lower-stage cooperatives in 1958 and higher-stage ones accelerating from 1960 amid emulation of Soviet and Chinese models. By the early 1970s, approximately 85% of northern farm households were organized into collectives, emphasizing state procurement quotas and centralized planning to boost output for war efforts and industrialization.[61] However, the system engendered inefficiencies, including weak work incentives and mismanagement, resulting in stagnant yields; rice production per capita in the North hovered around 200-250 kg annually in the 1970s, insufficient for self-sufficiency.[62] After unification in 1975, collectivization was imposed on the South, covering over 90% of farmland by 1980, but encountered peasant resistance through output concealment and black markets, exacerbating food shortages that affected millions.[63] De facto dismantling began with pilot household contracts in 1981, culminating in the 1988 Land Law that allocated long-term use rights to families, spurring productivity gains of 30-50% in rice yields within a decade as private incentives replaced collective apathy.[64] North Korea's agricultural sector remains predominantly organized under cooperative farms, comprising about 90% of cultivated land and managed through the state's Public Distribution System since the 1950s, when collectivization was enforced post-Korean War to align with Juche self-reliance ideology.[65] Farms operate on work-point systems tied to state plans, with grains requisitioned at fixed low prices, but chronic underinvestment in inputs led to dependency on imports; by the 1980s, food production covered only 60-70% of needs, precipitating the 1994-1998 famine that killed an estimated 240,000 to 3.5 million due to floods, policy rigidity, and collapsed collectives unable to adapt.[66] Partial reforms emerged in the 1990s via "private plots" and the 2012 June 28 Measures, allowing sub-team contracting and market sales of surpluses, which boosted non-state output to 30-40% of total by 2020, though official collectives persist amid ongoing shortages averaging 1 million tons of grain deficit yearly.[67] Recent 2023 amendments to the Farms Act emphasize intensified labor and technology but retain centralized control, yielding limited gains as farms prioritize quotas over efficiency.[68] In Mongolia, Soviet-influenced collectivization targeted the nomadic pastoral economy starting in the 1930s, with initial state farms for crops established by 1931 and livestock herding cooperatives (negdels) mandated from 1955, achieving full coverage by 1959-1960 to facilitate mechanization and central planning.[69] By 1989, over 250 negdels managed 80% of the 25 million-head livestock inventory through assigned brigades and seasonal migrations, supplemented by 50 state farms producing grains on irrigated plots covering 1-2% of land, yielding annual outputs of 500,000-700,000 tons of wheat by the late 1980s.[69] This shift disrupted traditional herding, causing initial livestock losses from resistance and mismanagement—herds dropped 20-30% in the 1930s-1940s—but stabilized under subsidies, enabling modest industrialization at the cost of environmental strain from overgrazing fixed routes.[70] Post-1990 democratic transition privatized collectives, distributing animals to households and dissolving negdels by 1992, which restored flexibility but exposed vulnerabilities to dzuds (harsh winters), as decentralized herders lacked the collective buffers of fodder storage and mobility coordination.[71]African and Latin American Attempts: Tanzania and Cuba
In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa policy, formalized in the 1967 Arusha Declaration, promoted African socialism through voluntary communal villages emphasizing collective farming and self-reliance, but evolved into coercive villagization by the mid-1970s. [72] Operation Vijiji, launched in 1974, forcibly relocated over 5 million rural residents—approximately 70% of the population—into planned settlements between 1973 and 1976, disrupting traditional dispersed farming practices and imposing communal labor without adequate infrastructure or incentives. [73] [74] This centralization aimed to boost agricultural output through shared resources, yet resulted in immediate declines as farmers abandoned fields during relocations and resisted mandatory collective work due to weakened personal incentives and poor yields from unfamiliar group plots. [75] Agricultural production stagnated or fell post-villagization; World Bank analysis noted sluggish growth in output after the mid-1960s, coinciding with Ujamaa's intensification, while food and export crop declines—such as maize and cash crops—persisted into the 1980s, exacerbating shortages despite government attributions to droughts. [76] [77] Empirical studies link these outcomes to villagization's disruption of ecological balances, soil degradation from concentrated settlement, and lack of market signals, with long-term effects including reduced household consumption and agricultural persistence in affected areas. [78] By the early 1980s, policy abandonment under structural adjustment reflected Ujamaa's failure to achieve productivity gains, as communal structures fostered shirking and underinvestment compared to private smallholdings. [79] In Cuba, the 1959 revolution initiated agrarian reform via the First Agrarian Reform Law on May 17, 1959, which expropriated latifundia over 402 hectares, redistributed parcels to about 31,425 peasants (up to 28 hectares each), and formed initial cooperatives like 622 sugarcane units and 263 People's Farms by 1961. [80] The 1963 Second Agrarian Reform Law radicalized this process, capping private holdings at 67 hectares and placing 70% of arable land under state farms through further nationalizations, including 4.4 million hectares from U.S. owners, shifting toward centralized planning over private incentives. [80] From 1975, Agricultural Production Cooperatives (CPAs) institutionalized collectivization, growing to 1,378 units covering 1 million hectares by 1985, where members shared profits but adhered to state quotas, while Credit and Service Cooperatives (CCSs) supported individual plots under collective oversight. [80] These reforms yielded short-term land access gains but precipitated productivity shortfalls; output stabilized until 1961 before food shortages prompted rationing in 1962, as fixed quotas and low state prices eroded expansion incentives, leading to chronic inefficiencies in state-dominated farms reliant on Soviet subsidies. [80] Sugarcane productivity in collective units, for instance, halved from 211.6 tons per member in 1993–94 to 113.1 tons in 2002–03, reflecting broader declines in yields and output amid centralized mismanagement and lack of private property rights. [81] By the 1980s, Cuba's agriculture depended heavily on imports for basics despite vast state lands, with collectivization's incentive voids—evident in apathy and low labor effort—contributing to post-Soviet collapse vulnerabilities, though initial growth masked underlying causal failures in aligning effort with rewards. [82] [83]Voluntary and Market-Oriented Collectives
Israeli Kibbutzim: Formation, Successes, and Evolutions
The kibbutzim emerged as voluntary communal settlements in the early 20th century, rooted in Labor Zionist ideology that combined Jewish national revival with socialist principles of collective labor and ownership. The first kibbutz, Degania Alef, was established in 1910 near the Sea of Galilee by a small group of Second Aliyah pioneers who rejected private property and wage labor in favor of shared resources and equal work distribution to reclaim and cultivate underutilized land in Ottoman Palestine.[84] [85] This model expanded during the British Mandate era, with dozens more founded by the 1930s, often on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund; by Israel's independence in 1948, around 100 kibbutzim existed, comprising about 7% of the Jewish population and playing a pivotal role in frontier defense and agricultural expansion amid Arab hostility and sparse infrastructure.[84] Kibbutzim achieved notable successes in agriculture and economic development, leveraging communal organization and ideological motivation to transform arid regions into productive farmland through innovations like cooperative labor brigades and early adoption of technologies such as drip irrigation precursors. In 2010, kibbutz agriculture accounted for 40% of Israel's total output, valued at over $1.7 billion, despite occupying only 4% of cultivated land, demonstrating high per-unit efficiency driven by collective investment in machinery and training.[86] Beyond farming, many diversified into industry and high-tech by the late 20th century, with examples like Kibbutz Sdot Yam producing global brands such as Caesarstone quartz surfaces and Kibbutz Shamir Optical developing precision lenses, contributing to Israel's export economy and underscoring the adaptability of motivated voluntary collectives.[87] Socially, kibbutzim fostered gender equality in labor and education, with women comprising half the workforce from inception, and provided elite military units like the Palmach, which were instrumental in the 1948 War of Independence.[84] These outcomes stemmed from high member commitment and state land allocations, though empirical data indicate that such productivity relied on external subsidies and pioneer zeal rather than inherent collective superiority over private farming.[84] From the 1980s onward, kibbutzim underwent profound evolutions amid Israel's economic liberalization, hyperinflation, and mounting debts totaling billions by the mid-1980s, prompting a shift from pure communalism to hybrid models with private incentives. Facing demographic decline as younger members emigrated for urban opportunities and free-rider problems eroded morale, over 200 of Israel's 273 kibbutzim privatized by the early 2000s, introducing differential salaries, personal budgets, and home ownership while retaining some shared services; only about 60 remained fully collective by 2014.[88] [89] This transition, accelerated by the 1985 stabilization plan and global market pressures, boosted financial recovery—kibbutz industries now generate significant GDP contributions through tech firms—but halved membership to around 2% of Israel's population by the 2010s, reflecting the causal limits of enforced equality in sustaining long-term voluntary adherence.[90] Today, surviving ideological kibbutzim emphasize sustainability and education, while privatized ones operate as affluent suburban communities, illustrating how initial successes gave way to market-oriented reforms to avert collapse.[88]Western and Non-Socialist Cooperatives: Examples from Europe, India, and North America
In contrast to state-mandated collectivization, Western and non-socialist agricultural cooperatives operate as voluntary associations of private landowners who retain control over their farms and production decisions, pooling resources primarily for marketing, processing, and supply chain efficiencies within competitive markets. These entities distribute patronage refunds based on individual members' transactions, aligning incentives with personal economic gain rather than centralized planning, which fosters adaptability and innovation absent in coercive systems.[91][92] EuropeThe Danish agricultural cooperative model, pioneered in the 1880s, demonstrates effective voluntary organization in dairy and livestock sectors. Starting with local butter factories in Jutland around 1882, farmers formed producer-owned societies to standardize quality, reduce costs through shared cooling and transport, and access export markets, transforming Denmark into a leading exporter of butter and bacon by the early 1900s.[93] By emphasizing member control and democratic governance, these cooperatives achieved higher efficiencies than individual smallholdings, with Denmark's dairy output per cow exceeding many European peers by the interwar period due to collective investments in breeding and feed.[91] Similar structures persist in modern entities like Arla Foods, a merger of Danish and Swedish cooperatives formed in 2000, which processes milk from over 12,000 farms and generates annual revenues exceeding €13 billion through market-driven competition.[94] India
India's Amul cooperative, formally established as the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union in 1946, exemplifies grassroots organization among small-scale dairy farmers facing exploitative middlemen. Under the leadership of Tribhuvandas Patel and with veterinary support from Verghese Kurien, it adopted a three-tier structure—village societies for collection, district unions for processing, and a federation for marketing—that empowered over 3 million members by linking them directly to consumers via branded products like butter and cheese.[95] This model contributed to India's White Revolution, boosting national milk production from 17 million metric tons in 1950-51 to approximately 210 million metric tons by 2022-23, with Gujarat's cooperatives accounting for a disproportionate share through efficient procurement and low-cost distribution.[96] Unlike state farms, Amul's success stems from retained individual animal ownership and performance-based payments, enabling scalability without land pooling and yielding sustained profitability, with the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation reporting turnover of over ₹80,000 crore (about $10 billion USD) in recent years.[95] North America
In the United States and Canada, farm cooperatives like Land O'Lakes, organized in 1921 through the consolidation of 320 creameries, provide members with integrated services including feed supply, genetics, and global marketing, serving over 1,700 dairy producers and generating $18 billion in annual revenue as of 2023.[97] This structure allows independent farmers to capture greater value from processing and branding, such as the Land O'Lakes butter label, while competing against corporate agribusiness through economies of scale in logistics and R&D. Similarly, Ocean Spray Cranberries, founded in 1930 by 14 Massachusetts growers, evolved into a cooperative owned by about 700 family farms across North America, handling over 1 billion pounds of cranberries annually and deriving 60% of U.S. production through member-controlled harvesting and juice manufacturing.[98][99] These organizations thrive by enforcing contracts that reward high-quality output and exit options for underperformers, contrasting with rigid socialist allocations and yielding consistent returns, with Ocean Spray distributing over $100 million in patronage refunds to growers in peak years.[100]
Economic Analysis and Empirical Outcomes
Productivity Comparisons: Data from Collectives vs. Private Farms
In the Soviet Union, private household plots, which constituted about 3% of sown land, generated 25-30% of total agricultural output during the 1970s and 1980s, yielding productivity levels 8 to 15 times higher per hectare than collective farms for comparable crops.[101] [102] This disparity was particularly evident in livestock and vegetables, where private plots produced over 50% of gross output despite their minimal land share, underscoring the efficiency losses from collective management structures lacking individual incentives.[103] Grain yields further illustrate the post-collectivization decline; average per-hectare output in the 1930s hovered around pre-1913 levels of 7-8 centners despite mechanization efforts, only recovering modestly to 10 centners by the 1950s amid chronic shortages.[104] In China, commune-based collectivization during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) resulted in sharp productivity drops, with grain output per capita falling 15-20% from 1957 peaks due to disrupted incentives and labor misallocation.[105] The subsequent household responsibility system, implemented from 1978 onward, reversed this by assigning individual land contracts, boosting grain production by approximately 33% between 1978 and 1984 through enhanced farmer effort and specialization.[106] Private plots under communes, limited to 5-7% of arable land, similarly outperformed collective fields in vegetable and sideline production, contributing disproportionately to rural incomes and highlighting the role of personal stakes in output.[107] Post-communist privatizations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics provide additional evidence of productivity gains from shifting to private farming; in Russia and Ukraine, farm-level efficiency rose 20-30% in the decade following land decollectivization, driven by market-oriented restructuring despite initial output dips from transition shocks.[103] [108] Voluntary collectives, such as Israeli kibbutzim, deviated from this pattern, achieving higher productivity growth rates than private moshavim farms through collective scale and ideological commitment, producing up to 40% of national agricultural output from a small population base in the mid-20th century.[109] However, even kibbutzim experienced long-term declines in agricultural shares as members opted for differential rewards, leading to partial privatization by the 1990s.| Region/Period | Collective/Private Land Share | Output Share | Productivity Multiple (Private vs. Collective) |
|---|---|---|---|
| USSR (1970s-1980s) | Private: ~3% sown land | Private: 25-30% total ag output | 8-15x per hectare[102] |
| China Communes (pre-1978) | Private plots: 5-7% arable | Disproportionate in sidelines | >2x in key crops[107] |
| Post-Soviet (1990s-2000s) | Shift to private post-privatization | Output recovery 20-30% | Efficiency gains via markets[103] |
