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Abstract
This article attempts to describe the gender dimensions and aspects of agrarian transition/transformation in post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe with a focus on family farms. This farming model is characterised by a conflation of labour, land, capital, management and human bonding and was promoted by the privatisation policy of post-socialist restructuring. Several problems of the new family farms are looked at with a gender perspective, singling out ideological, social and economic parameters.
Este artículo intenta describir las dimensiones de género y algunos aspectos de la transición/transformación agraria en los países post socialistas de Europa Central y del Este, haciendo hincapié en las granjas familiares. Este modelo de producción agraria está caracterizado por una combinación de trabajo, tierra, capital, manejo y apego humano y fue promovido por la política de privatización de la reestructuración post-socialista. Algunos de los problemas de estas nuevas granjas familiares son estudiados desde una perspectiva de género, identificando parámetros ideológicos, sociales y económicos.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Dubravka Zarkov, Tanja Djuric, Martina Ritter, Libora Oates-Indruchová and Helen Hambly for their comments on an earlier version of this article, to the Gender, Place and Culture reviewers for their critique and suggestions, and to the very helpful editorial staff of the journal. I am, however, ultimately responsible for the contents of this article.
Notes
1. The article does not deal with the issue of diverse family composition, although diversity definitely exists, as can be seen in examples of families with adult children living abroad and sending remittances home, families comprising single mothers, who adjust farming to suit their physical limits, and old couples who are too weak to work and have to rely on their pensions and assistance from children and neighbours. Notwithstanding the diversity in family composition, the family farm model is based on the nuclear and extended family with sufficient labour to organise agricultural production.
2. Djurfeldt (Citation1996) defines the family farm as a unit of production, consumption and kinship.
3. Swain (Citation2000) provides a more differentiated classification of socialist agriculture: he distinguishes four models a) a dual agriculture with few large state farms and very many peasant farms in Poland and Yugoslavia, the latter producing for subsistence and the national market, b) Stalinist collectivisation with a fully collectivised agriculture, and marginal private household plots for self-consumption, mainly in Romania and Albania, c) a neo-Stalinist model with a collectivised agriculture diversifying into non-agricultural activities, but linked to ancillary household plots, dominant in Czechoslovakia, the GDR and Bulgaria, and d) a Hungarian model with a symbiotic relationship between collective and private agriculture, allowing the latter to sell on the market since the 1980s.
4. I refrain from interpreting this agricultural dualism as a gender dualism – female small house-plots versus male large kolkhoz/sovchoz – as women and men work on both; an analysis of the gender division of labour and gender relations seems more promising.
5. Farming private plots did not only have a subsistence function for better food consumption; it is also used as a lifestyle element for urban people who could regenerate their labour power on the dacha as well as engage in residual part-time farming for the enrichment of their diet. The dacha has some parallel with the Central European Schrebergarten, named after the Viennese pedagogue Schreber who proclaimed that workers need sunshine and fresh air to improve their health, which they could get on small plots at urban peripheries. These settlements can still be found in virtually all urban fringes in Central Eastern Europe countries.
6. The Russian analyst A.J. Chayanov, well known for his book The Theory of Peasant Economy (published 1918 in Russian and 1966 in English), described the survival capacities of farming families and their networks; one of the peasant survival strategies would be self-exploitation in order to provide a minimum standard of living of the family farm. T. Shanin, in a recent review of Chayanov's thinking, emphasised the complexity of Chayanov's ideas about agrarian transformation, in which non-monetised plus market-oriented strategies give guidance to rural forms of agricultural organisation, best demonstrated under the Hungarian model that combines large-scale collective enterprises with family unit production and marketing. See http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/Books/Shanin/chayanov.htm.
7. Even though written about the American farmer, the quote is appealing for a post-socialist society that liberated the populace from state control. The model of the free farmer is cherished in the USA and in Western Europe alike, although that freedom is a myth, given the dependence on technology, agribusiness and state subsidies, as Strange (Citation1990) affirms.
8. In the terminology of privatisation and decollectivisation, the terms ‘private farm’, ‘individual farm’, and ‘family farm’ are conflated. Private farming emphasises individual responsibility in contrast to state or cooperative responsibility. Individual farming does not mean that a single person is doing all of the farm work; rather, it refers to individual land ownership and thus has a legal meaning. Family farm refers to the entity of a two-generation or extended family, whose members are engaged in farm work.
9. The IFI is calculated by dividing the difference between the share of individual farms in total agricultural land in 1995 and in 1989 by 100 minus the share of individual farms in total agricultural land in 1980.
10. Albania's privatisation of agricultural land has been done quickly, but has led to many disputes between former owners and new owners, sometimes violent (especially during the 1997 uprisings when weapons were stolen en masse from depots). The process of land distribution is still not finished, and the sale of land has only been allowed since 1998 (Aliko Citation2001).
11. The new law on privatisation of land in the Former Soviet Union from June 2002 might lead, in the future, to a new dynamism in agrarian reform.
12. Riddel (Citation2000, 2) emphasises the prospects of leasing contracts: ‘In a significant number of countries in transition, rural land, especially restituted farm property, has taken on a residual national/ethnic and/or cultural identity value that prevents it being a freely tradable capital asset for the foreseeable future. Formalised and institutionally supported leasing arrangements have the added value of clarifying and providing security to both the person leasing out as well as for the person leasing in. The partial or temporal interest, in contrast to alienation through sale, is much easier to constitute as a freely tradable production factor in the present circumstances, because leasing markets reflect the economic earning value of the land and are not as subject to speculative and other considerations.’ Invisibility of women in leasing arrangements either as a lesser or a lessee is evident in this specific discussion of land reform, just as it is in the general privatisation literature.
13. http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/essdext.nsf/25DocByUnid/7D52254EB35F3BAF85256B9A0008C8CB?Opendocument, p. 1 (accessed January 25, 2003).
14. Discussion at CESTRAD conference ‘Transition, Institutions and the Rural Sector’, CESTRAD, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, December 10–11, 2001.
15. Regional Workshop on Land Issues in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, Budapest, April 3–6, 2002.
16. “The zadruga is a large family or clan organised on a patrilineal basis, living together in one dwelling and holding all land, livestock, and money in common. The oldest able member of the community is usually its ruler, responsible for allotting tasks to the members. This system, which was common to all the South Slavs, existed in Serbia into the twentieth century (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/z1/zadruga.asp).
17. For example, in the Ukraine home gardens constitute 13% of farmland. The average size of the household plots doubled in five years from less than 0.3 ha to 0.5 ha, and account for 30% of the gross agricultural product. Most of the produce (vegetables, fruits, eggs, poultry, small livestock) is consumed on the farm, but at least some (mostly milk and meat) is sold directly to consumers (Lerman, Brooks, and Csaki Citation1994, 89). Similar increases in the size of household plots have been observed in Russia (Brooks and Lerman Citation1994).