Smallholder agriculture in transition economies

Smallholder production in Russia has been in decline for more than a decade. The likelihood is for continued marginalization. Smallholders confront four obstacles. First, path dependencies, which includes the fact that smallholders' production remains traditional and subsistence oriented. Second, institutions in the form of state policy restrict land and animals. Third, Russia's role in the third food regime means that smallholders are unable to help Russia's emergence as a global food superpower. Fourth, smallholders are being left behind in the ongoing technological revolution led by agroholdings. As technological advancement expands in scope, the gap between large farms and smallholders will widen.

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 65%

The “left behind”: Smallholders in contemporary Russian agriculture

Wegren

2018

“…We find that labour productivity (the ratio of GAO to the number of employed in agriculture), while increasing over time after 1998, remains lower than land productivity in all CIS countries. This echoes to a certain extent the findings of Burkitbayeva and Swinnen (2018) in his paper in this symposium, where Figure 1 shows that labour productivity decreases with the increase of the share of smallholders in GAO (this share is strikingly high in Central Asia, see Table 1).…”

Section: Comparing the Productivity Of Farms In Central Asiasupporting

confidence: 77%

Transition to smallholder agriculture in Central Asia

Lerman

Sedik²

2018

The article reviews the development of smallholder farming in Central Asia's former Soviet republics. One of the striking features of the agricultural transition in Central Asia (and Commonwealth of Independent States [CIS] in general) is the dramatic shift, since 1992, from the predominance of large corporate farms to individual or family agriculture based on a spectrum of small farms. Evidence shows that individualization of agriculture is associated with the observed posttransition recovery in Central Asia (and in CIS in general) and that small family farms outperform the large enterprises. This clashes with the traditional philosophy of economies of scale and with the inherited view of small family farms as an undesirable aberration. We discuss the policies that helped smallholder farms in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan and severely restricted their growth and development in Uzbekistan and especially Turkmenistan.

“…In developing countries, medium and large farmers are usually engaged in value chains for reasons of scale and quality standards, thereby excluding smallholders (Markelova, Meinzen‐Dick, Hellin, & Dohrn, ). The same is true in contemporary CEE as discussed by Burkitbayeva and Swinnen () in this symposium. This occurrence is important because it deprives smallholders of revenue streams that alleviate poverty and that have assisted smallholders in modernizing their production processes in other parts of the world (Weatherspoon & Reardon, ).…”

Section: Contemporary Role Of Smallholderssupporting

confidence: 63%

Introduction to symposium: Smallholders in communist and postcommunist societies

Wegren

O’Brien

2018

The primary contributions of smallholders during the communist and early postcommunist periods have been food production and labour for large farms. Those conditions are changing, however, as modern farms require less labour and food supply may be imported. For most smallholders in Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries, the postcommunist neoliberal environment has not brought significant improvement, and strong arguments can be made that land grabbing, social and economic exclusion, and rural poverty are worse than regime bias during the communist period. Cooperatives, which have empowered smallholders in other parts of the world, have not been as well developed in postcommunist nations.