Dharam Ghai

Collective Agriculture in Soviet Central Asia

The territory that now forms the Soviet Central Asian economic region was annexed by Tsarist Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. The present national boundaries were drawn in the decade following the Soviet Revolution. Although the criteria of delimitation were linguistic and cultural each of the republics is in reality today a multinational entity. The region consists of four republics: Uzbekistan (14.5 million people in 1977), Tajikistan (3.6 million), Kirghizia (3.4 million) and Turkmenistan (2.7 million). Together the four republics have a territory of 1.3 million square kilometres. The average population density of 19 per square kilometre is misleading. Vast parts of the region consist of desert or mountains where very few people live. In the fertile river basin the density of population frequently exceeds 200 per square kilometre.

Labour and Development in Rural Cuba

How far has Cuban agriculture advanced since 1959? How have conditions changed for the rural workers and their dependants? What are the prospects for the future? These are the questions we shall examine in the coming chapter, looking first at social developments and amenities in the rural sector, then at trends within the labour force, including workers’ incomes, and finally at the economic performance of the sector as a whole.

The Economy and Agriculture

The policies of the late 1960s dislocated the economy in many regions of the countryside, and indeed throughout the country as a whole. Absenteeism had reached the point where one worker in five was away from work at any one time as there was so little material urgency to attend. The huge mobilisations of voluntary labour, culminating in 1970 when 700 000 took part in the zafra, did not achieve the desired results, while severely disrupting the rest of the economy. Farm production was stagnant, and relations between the State and the private farming sector had been badly strained by the Revolutionary Offensive.

The Non-state Sector

During the 1960s, while agriculture became increasingly polarised between the state farm and the individual private farm, little official interest was shown in establishing a middle ground. The revolutionary takeover had prompted several thousand peasant farmers to collectivise on their own initiative. But without official encouragement or special support their number had steadily dwindled, so that by the time production cooperatives received official blessing as a ‘socialist form of agriculture’ in the mid-1970s, only forty-three remained.

Cuban Experience in Rural Development: Some Concluding Observations

Cuba’s post-revolutionary experience of development extending over more than a quarter of a century, offers many points of interest. Since 1959 a series of key institutional changes in the economy and society have taken place, accompanied by changing priorities in development strategy and in economic organisation and mechanisms. This final chapter summarises the main aspects of the island’s economic and social performance, highlights its most distinctive features, and explores some underlying weaknesses and critical issues for the future.

The State Farms

Between 1959 and 1963, the state farm grew from nothing to become the dominant sector of Cuban agriculture. But while the workers gained permanent guaranteed employment and greatly enhanced health care, educational opportunity and other social benefits, output failed to expand significantly under the new system.

The First Decade

Although just over half the population lived in urban centres by 1959, Cuba before the revolution was an eminently agrarian country.

Income distribution and labour utilisation under different agrarian systems.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore some implications for rural income distribution and labour utilisation of different institutional arrangements for land ownership and organisation of agricultural production. While the problems of poverty, income distribution and employment have been much discussed in recent years, relatively few attempts have been made to isolate the impact of institutional arrangements. For the purpose of this discussion, ‘institutional arrangements’ or ‘agrarian systems’ are defined narrowly to refer to patterns of ownership of means of production, primarily land, and of organisation of agricultural production. Before proceeding further, it is important at the outset to make explicit the scope and limitations of this paper.