Central European Villages after 1990

Abstract

The results of an international data collection made in 1994, are presented in our paper. The survey covered the rural population of four countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia). Based on our data we are looking for answers to the question what kind of characteristic differences have evolved in the agriculture of the four countries studied. Changes in employment in agriculture, the sources of livelihood, the ways of acquiring land and the distribution of landed property by size in each country, and finally the supply of farms with tools and their problems of marketing are described. Our most important conclusion deriving from the comparisons is that the specificities evolved in the past have basically determined the reorganisation of agriculture in each country. In Poland there is still a more traditional agriculture; their production is less specialised, the social composition of cultivators is more homogeneous than elsewhere. In the Czech Republic and in Slovakia there had been centralised units of agricultural production, where the workers were employees. After the transformation that structure of production has been retained; there are large-scale, well-equipped farms, and the small, or medium-sized peasant farm is a rarity. In Hungary there had been a relatively broad opportunity open during the past decades in the ancillary farms for the rural population to join agricultural production operating in many respects as if in a market economy. As a result the new stratum of owners is more pluralistic, and production is more specialised if compared to the Polish one.