Agriculture in Communist Czechoslovakia

Government policy encouraged cooperation and specialization among the various agricultural units. Both informal and formal arrangements existed. Mutual aid in terms of machinery or labor for particular tasks had long been practiced among neighboring farms, and this continued under the collectivized farming system. More formal arrangements took shape in the 1960s and expanded in the 1970s. Many of these took the form of "joint agricultural enterprises," entities that somewhat resembled stock companies. Some cooperative organizations specialized in such activities as fattening of hogs or cattle, production of eggs or drying and production of feed mixtures. Others offered agrichemical, construction, land improvement, or marketing services. A large number of these organizations engaged in multiple activities.

Management of most large farms was organized hierarchically on three levels. On large cooperative farms, an assembly of members or their elected representatives was legally responsible for farm operation, although a committee and its chairman carried out daily management of operation. In practice, the assembly functioned largely to ratify decisions already made by the chairman. As cooperative farms increased in size, the authority of the assembly of members declined. Boards of economic management, consisting of the chairman and a staff of experts on various operations, took over the most important management functions. The second echelon of management in large cooperatives or state farms had responsibility for smaller operations in either a specific area or a particular branch of production. The third level of management organized the labor force performing the farm work, such as the field brigades. The chairman of a cooperative or the director of a state farm held most of the power in the organization, and the subordinate levels were severely restricted in their decision making.

Even before World War II, industrialization in Czechoslovakia had substantially reduced the relative importance of agriculture in the economy. Before the KSČ gained control of the government, Czechoslovak agriculture consisted primarily of small to mid-size family farms with an efficiency on a par with most of Europe. The situation did not change until 1949, when the KSČ initiated a policy of collectivization. The pace of collectivization was gradual until the late 1950s and was generally more thorough in the Czech lands than in Slovakia. Collectivization was essentially completed by 1960. Large numbers of farmers, particularly the young, left agriculture for more attractive industrial jobs. In the 1960s, the active farm population consisted largely of women and older men.

Under communist rule, agriculture received much less attention and investment funding than industry. Partly because of this fact, agricultural output grew slowly, not regaining prewar levels of production until the 1960s. Falling productivity and the need to increase farm output to reduce agricultural imports eventually drew official attention to agriculture. A principal government goal was to encourage large-scale farming that could benefit from modern technologies and powerful farm equipment. Proceeding slowly during the 1980s, consolidation of farms accelerated in the 1970s. Most of the larger cooperatives encompassed several villages and raised a variety of crops and livestock. In the 1960s, in an effort to increase farm incomes, the government raised the prices of farm products; during the previous decade, by contrast, prices for farm produce had been kept low, partly to extract workers and investment funds for the expansion of industry. By the early 1970s, the average farm income reportedly had reached parity with that of urban white- collar workers. The farm labor force of the 1980s was relatively young (45% was under 40 years of age in 1980) and well educated. The performance of the agricultural sector improved markedly during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. In 1960 the official index of gross agricultural output (in constant 1980 prices) had stood at 96, compared with 100 in 1936. In 1970 the index reached 116.8, and by 1980 it had increased to 143. Between 1981 and 1985, according to official sources, total agricultural production increased by 9.8% over the 1980 level.

Crop cultivation slowly became less important in the gross output of the agricultural sector. Cropping and livestock were almost equal branches in 1960, but by 1985 crops accounted for only 43% of gross agricultural output compared with 57% for livestock products. The main crop products in the 1980s were wheat, barley, potatoes, sugar beets, rye, and hops (an important export crop). Sugar, derived from sugar beet production, was both a significant export crop (especially to hard currency areas) and an important item of domestic consumption. Fruit and vegetables accounted for only a small part of the cultivated area. Since the 1950s, the supply of livestock gradually increased because of government encouragement. Producers were urged to meet the demand for meat that accompanied the rise in income levels of the population. After the collectivization of agriculture, raising livestock increasingly became a large-scale operation, usually undertaken in conjunction with cropping. The major constraint to livestock expansion was a shortage of fodder and feed mixtures, although government pricing policies and the labor demands of animal husbandry also tended to deter efforts. During the 1970s, progress was made in expanding the supplies of fodder and feed mixtures and the country's processing capacity. However, it remained necessary to supplement the supply of feed and fodder through imports, which became increasingly burdensome because they came from non-communist countries and thus required payment in convertible currencies.

The basic aim of agricultural policy in the mid-1980s, with regard to both crop and livestock production, was self-sufficiency. Record harvests in 1984 and 1985 made it possible to virtually halt grain imports, which had amounted to about 500,000 tons per year. During the Seventh Five-Year Plan, the government was able to reduce imports of feed grains to one-third the level of the previous five-year plan without causing a reduction in per capita meat consumption, an achievement suggesting that the efficiency of animal husbandry had improved. Performance in the agricultural sector as a whole remained uneven in the 1980s, however. Although some outstanding farms were obtaining excellent grain yields, the uneven quality of farm management contributed to large discrepancies in performance between farms.

This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Country Studies. Federal Research Division.