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Book Review: Communist Agriculture. Fanning in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

This book is one of a pair: the companion volume deals with farming in the communist countries of the Far East and Cuba. Both stem from a meeting of experts on communist agriculture (the eighth in a series begun in 1962)held at the Berkeley Campus of the University of California in August 1987.The meeting organizers and volume editor clearly recognized that at the time of this latest conference the pace of political and social change in the USSRand other countries of Eastern Europe was ever quickening, and took steps to update material presented at the conference to reflect this evolving situation. But the cataclysmic political changes of autumn 1989,and their consequences for agricultural policy and management, overtook these best intentions to provide thoroughly current assessments of the agricultural sectors of these countries. Two-thirds of the book is devoted to analyses of agriculture in the USSR: 14 chapters provide the historical, social and environmental background leading to the development of policies operating in the mid-SO's. A further seven chapters deal with issues surrounding the organization and productivity of agriculture in Bulgaria, GDR, Hungary and Poland. Together the chapters provide a wealth of information: such knowledge often was gleaned with considerable difficulty, may not be fully comprehensive, but is of undoubted value to Western readers. The volume's editor, in the final chapter, comments on the relative strengths of the agricultural sectors of the different countries. In line with a global pattern, those countries having better industrial infrastructures and stronger economies (e.g, Czechoslovakia and GDR) also have developed better resourced and productive agricultures that employ smaller percentages of the national workforces. The beginnings of a relaxation of central controls over agricultural production and prices was apparent in Hungary at the time of the conference: the challenge now lies in achieving an orderly and successful transition from centrally-planned agricultural systems to ones in which free market forces stimulate productivity and profitability, and improve the quality of agricultural commodities produced by these countries.