ABSTRACT
Seen from an economic point of view, agriculture in western as well as in eastern Germany (the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) is of minor importance. Agriculture’s share in the total active labour force in western Germany is only 3 per cent and in eastern Germany 11 per cent, whereas respective shares in gross domestic product (GDP) were 2 and 10 per cent in 1989.1 Nevertheless, compared to industry the economic and social problems brought forth by the process of the integration of eastern Germany’s agriculture as a result of political and economic unification are more severe. The main reason for such an assessment has to be seen in the fact that after the end of World War II, agriculture in eastern Germany was subjected not only to a formal and informal expropriation of the former farm owners2 similar to the expropriation in industry and trade, but also to two fundamental and forceful reforms of the sizes and forms of organization of farms. In industry, however, similar reforms did not take place. Whereas in 1939, eastern German agriculture consisted of 573,000 mainly family farms with an average farm size of about eleven hectares,3 in 1951 that number was increased to about 789,000 smaller farms by land-reform measures in 1945. Larger farms of a hundred and more hectares were expropriated and farm land was distributed to farm workers, small farmers etc. However, in the 1960s the farms were collectivized, resulting in 1,243 big land-using farms with an average size of 4,742 hectares in 1989. These ‘factory farms’ were mainly organized as ‘agricultural producer cooperatives’.4 State farms of a similar size,5 however, accounted for only about 15 per cent of all farms. With these land-reform measures-parcelling out larger farms, first, and, later on, collectivizing the small farms that had originally been formed-the German Democratic Republic imitated the Soviet Union and Stalin’s model of collective agriculture executed in 1929, as did most other countries that became ‘socialistic’ after World War I I.6 In western
Germany, average farm size in 1989 was about eighteen hectares, so that almost all farms are organized as family farms. More than half of these farms are part-time farms according to official statistics, implying that many farms are too small to provide the farm family with full employment and income comparable with the income of non-farm families. Therefore, active family members are engaged in off-farm employment.
