Journal
JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE
Volume 18, Issue 4, Pages 904-912Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/joac.12282
Keywords
agricultural productivity; agricultural transition; Central Asia; land reform; smallholders
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available